HIDDEN TREASURE 87 



quiet, I never would have learned her secret. When, 

 however, she came back, flying from branch to branch 

 with fluttering wings and jerking tail, keeping up at 

 the same time a rattle of alarm-notes like a tiny 

 machine-gun, even a novice like myself would sus- 

 pect a nest. 



Fortunately a broken hazel bush marked the exact 

 spot from which she had flown. On going there, 

 and looking carefully near its base, I found what has 

 always seemed to me one of the most beautifully 

 hidden nests of all the hundreds which I have seen 

 since perhaps because it was my first rare nest. It 

 was roofed in by the split hazel-branch, and made of 

 woven dry grass and leaves, with a scanty lining of 

 horse-hair and a flooring of leaf-fragments. Inside 

 were five eggs. Four of them were bluish- white, 

 with aureoles of reddish-brown blotches around the 

 blunt ends; but the fifth was larger, and was specked 

 and splashed with blotches of rufous and brown- 

 purple. Long afterwards I learned that this last 

 egg was the fatal gift of that vampire the cow-bird, 

 and that by leaving it there I had doomed the four 

 legitimate future birds of that nest to certain death. 

 Sooner or later the deadly changeling would hatch 

 from that egg and roll its foster-brothers out of the 

 nest to starve. 



That day, however, I was ignorant even of the 

 name of the bird whose nest I had found. For long 

 I stood and gloated like a miser over the little 

 jewel-casket which the mother-bird had shown me, 

 and for the first time realized that anywhere in the 



