NESTS AND NO NESTS. 



omnibuses distract one ; but in the country, 

 one gives way a great deal too readily to 

 what Plato calls the "divine disease" of 

 thinking. I began to philosophize. How 

 curious, I said to myself, that we have but 

 five kinds of bird in England that hawk on 

 the wing after insects in the open ; and of all 

 those five, not one builds a proper respect- 

 able nest, woven of twigs and straws, like a 

 sparrow or a robin ! Every one of them 

 has some peculiar little fancy of his own 

 goes in for some individual freak of 

 originality. The night-jar, which is the 

 simplest and earliest in type of the group, 

 lays its eggs on the bare ground, and rises 

 superior in its Spartan simplicity to such 

 petty luxuries as beds and bedding. The 

 swift, that ecclesiologically - minded bird, 

 which loves the chief seats in the synagogue, 

 the highest pinnacles of tower or steeple, 

 gums together a soft nest of floating thistle- 

 down and feathers, by means of a sticky 

 secretion from its own mouth, distilled in the 

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