18 THE AMERICAN EAGLE. 



it back triumphantly to land. Its left pinion still adorns 

 the inkstand into which I dip my pen to write this nar- 

 rative. 



As for my friend Whitehead, thanks to his splendid 

 ebon-hued wig, he escaped without a scratch. But he 

 afterwards died, while hunting, of a stroke of apoplexy. 



The eagle of the United States, like its European con- 

 gener, rarely lives alone, and, according to Audubon, 

 the illustrious naturalist, whose premature death is to be 

 regretted, the mutual attachment of the male and female 

 seems to last from their first union down to the death 

 of one or the other. Eagles hunt for their food, like 

 a couple of piratical confederates, and eat their prey 

 together. Their love-season commences in the month of 

 December, and thenceforth both male and female become 

 very noisy. You may see them flying in company, whirl- 

 ing in the azure space, crying with their uttermost force, 

 playing and even fighting with one another (but in per- 

 fect good temper), and finally retiring to rest on the dry 

 branches of a tree, where the two have prepared the first 

 layer of their nest. Or, perhaps, they have contented them- 

 selves with repairing that of the last incubation. The 

 incubation begins, I may add, early in January. The 

 nest is composed of sticks about three and a quarter feet 

 in length, of fragments of turf and shreds of lichen ; and 

 it measures, when completed, about five to six feet in 

 circumference. The eggs deposited by the female in this 

 shapeless thicket are two, three, and sometimes though 

 rarely four in number, are of a greenish white, equally 

 rounded at the two extremities. Incubation occupies 

 from three to four weeks. 



