BIRD'S-NESTING 103 



To-day the first nest discovered was that of the 

 junco, or slate-colored snowbird, whose jingling little 

 song and the flutter of whose white skirts were every- 

 where throughout the woods. This one was close 

 to the camp, hollowed out of the side of a bank of 

 pine-needles, and held four white eggs sparsely 

 spotted with reddish-brown. The little mother-bird 

 chipped frantically, with a clicking note which the 

 Architect said always made him think that she car- 

 ried pebbles in her throat. 



There were trillions of trilliums, as the Artist 

 remarked epigrammatically. Some were the common 

 trilliums, of a dark garnet-red. Besides these we 

 found many of the rarer painted trilliums a pure 

 white triangle with a stained crimson reversed tri- 

 angle in the centre. All of the trilliums are studies 

 in triangles. The painted trillium has the crimson 

 triangle in the centre, set on the white triangle 

 made up of three petals which, in their turn, are fixed 

 in a reversed triangle of green sepals, and the whole 

 blossom is set in a still larger triangle made up of 

 three green leaves. Everywhere the woods were full 

 of purple-pink rhodora, the earliest of the azaleas. Its 

 blossoms were silver flecked with deeper-colored spots. 



The next nest found was to me the most eventful 

 one of the day, although not an especially rare one 

 on that mountain. The Architect was walking beside 

 one of the strange hummocks which are thought to 

 have been formed by buried tree-trunks in the path 

 of some old-time cyclone. Suddenly his eye was 

 caught by the gleam of four sky-blue eggs shining 



