IN carlyle's country 65 



ered friends. They turned about, with a bashful 

 smile, but without a word, and marched me a few 

 paces along the road, when they stepped to the 

 hedge, and showed me a hedge-sparrow's nest with 

 young. The mother bird was near, with food in 

 her beak. This nest is a great favorite of the 

 cuckoo, and is the one to which Shakespeare re- 

 fers : — 



" The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long 

 That it 's had it head bit off by it young." 



The bird is not a sparrow at all, but is a warbler, 

 closely related to the nightingale. Then they con- 

 ducted me along a pretty by-road, and parted away 

 the branches, and showed me a sparrow's nest with 

 eggs in it. A group of wild pansies, the first I 

 had seen, made bright the bank near it. Next, 

 after conferring a moment soberly together, they 

 took me to a robin's nest, — a warm, mossy struc- 

 ture in the side of the bank. Then we wheeled 

 up another road, and they disclosed the nest of the 

 yellow yite, or yell^^w-hammer, a bird of the spar- 

 row kind, also upon the ground. It seemed to 

 have a little platform of coarse, dry stalks, like a 

 door-stone, in front of it. In the mean time they 

 had showed me several nests of the hedge-sparrow, 

 and one of the shilfa, or chaffinch, that had been 

 "harried," as the boys said, or robbed. These 

 were gratuitous and merely by the way. Then they 

 pointed out to me the nest of a tomtit in a disused 

 pump that stood near the cemetery; after which 

 they proposed to conduct me to a chaffinch's nest 



