BIRD CRADLES. IO9 



artfully humored by the housewife or the ornithological curio 

 hunter, resulting in works of questionable art sophisticated with 

 all manner of contaminations rags and ribbons, tape and lamp- 

 wick, or perhaps patriotic pendants flying the national colors of 

 red, white, and blue in party-colored zones and strips of gaudy 

 flannel. In contrast to these I cannot but revert with relief to 

 that beautiful fancy which Chadwick has woven into one of these 

 beautiful nests, and in which the intertwined golden and silvery 

 locks of childhood and old age tell a pathetic story. 



In one case at least the hint of the oriole would appear to 

 have been appreciated, his nest having first introduced to the 

 public the utility of the black flexible compound which is so 

 common an ingredient towards the centre of our costly " curled- 

 hair" mattresses. 



During a recent Southern trip I noted one or two of these 

 pendulous mattresses of the oriole, their black color giving little 

 hint to the observer of the gray Southern moss of which they 

 are really constructed. In the Long Island Historical Rooms 

 there is a specimen of one of these Southern nests, fully eighteen 

 inches long, composed entirely of this glossy black fibre a veri- 

 table piece of hair-cloth to all appearances, no single thread, I 

 believe, showing its familiar gray complexion, the entire material 

 having been presumably abstracted from the drying-poles of the 

 "moss gatherers," beneath whose arts the Southern moss is con- 

 verted into "genuine curled hair" by the rotting and subsequent 

 removal of the gray covering, leaving only the black shiny core, 

 which is duly shipped and subsequently sold and " warranted " at 

 fifty cents a pound. 



In strong contrast to the foregoing products of warp and 

 woof is the humbler art of the plastic builders the adobe-dwell- 

 ers among our birds. Of such are the robin true child of the 

 sod, with its domicile of mud and coarse grass and the thrushes 

 generally, the phoebe, pewee, and the swallows. Solid and sub- 

 stantial fair-weather structures, they are yet far inferior in the 

 scale of architectural intelligence; for while in the textile nests 

 even a drenching rain serves but to amalgamate the mass, the 



