My Boyhood and Youth 



were beating highest and mysteriously keeping 

 time with our own ! Young hearts, young leaves, 

 flowers, animals, the winds and the streams and 

 the sparkling lake, all wildly, gladly rejoicing 

 together! 



Next morning, when we climbed to the pre- 

 cious jay nest to take another admiring look 

 at the eggs, we found it empty. Not a shell- 

 fragment was left, and we wondered how in 

 the world the birds were able to carry off their 

 thin-shelled eggs either in their bills or in their 

 feet without breaking them, and how they could 

 be kept warm while a new nest was being built. 

 Well, I am still asking these questions. When 

 I was on the Harriman Expedition I asked 

 Robert Ridgway, the eminent ornithologist, 

 how these sudden Sittings were accomplished, 

 and he frankly confessed that he did n't know, 

 but guessed that jays and many other birds 

 carried their eggs in their mouths; and when I 

 objected that a jay's mouth seemed too small 

 to hold its eggs, he replied that birds' mouths 

 were larger than the narrowness of their bills 

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