BIKDS'-NESTS. 127 



cost more time and skill than any other bird structure. 

 A peculiar flax-like substance seems to be always 

 sought after and always found. The nest when com- 

 pleted assumes the form of a large, suspended, gourd. 

 The walls are thin but firm, and proof against the 

 most driving rain. The mouth is hemmed or over- 

 handed with horse-hair, and the sides are usually 

 sewed through and through with the sarnie. 



Not particular as to the matter of secrecy, the bird 

 is not particular as to material, so that it be of the na- 

 ture of strings or threads. A lady friend once told me 

 that, while working by an open window, one of these 

 birds approached during her momentary absence, and, 

 seizing a skein of some kind of thread or yarn, made 

 off with it to its half-finished nest. But the perverse 

 yarn caught fast in the branches, and, in the bird's 

 efforts to extricate it, got hopelessly tangled. She 

 tugged away at it all day, but was finally obliged to 

 content herself with a few detached portions. The flut- 

 tering strings were an eye-sore to her ever after, and, 

 passing and repassing, she would give them a spiteful 

 jerk, as much as to say, "There is that confounded 

 yarn that gave me so much trouble." 



From Pennsylvania, Vincent Barnard (to whom I 

 am indebted for other curious facts) sent me this inter- 

 esting story of an oriole. He says a friend of his, 

 curious in such things, on observing the bird beginning 

 to build, hung out near the prospective nest skeins of 

 many-colored zephyr yarn, which the eager artist read- 



