IN CARLYLE'S COUNTRY. 71 



ing Sunday calls upon their feathered 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 refers : 



" The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long 

 That it had its head bit off by its 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 structure in the 

 side of the bank. Then we wheeled up another road, 

 and they disclosed the nest of the yellow yite, or 

 yellow-hammer, a bird of the sparrow 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 shelfa, 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 dis- 

 used pump that stood near the cemetery ; after which 

 they proposed to conduct me to a chaffinch's nest and 



