A MAGPIE'S NEST. 217 



zling the eyes. Again we caught glimpses of 

 two or three of the beautiful birds walking 

 about on the ground, holding their precious tails 

 well up from the earth, and gleaning indus- 

 triously the insect life of the horse pasture. At 

 one moment we were saluted from the top of a 

 tall tree, or shrieked at by one passing over our 

 heads, looking like an immense dragonfly against 

 the sky. Magpie voices were heard from morn- 

 ing till night ; strange, loud calls of " mag ! 

 mag ! " were ever in our ears. " Oh, yes," we 

 had said, " we must surely go out some morning 

 and find a nest." 



First we inquired. Everybody knew where 

 they built, in oak-brush or in apple-trees, but 

 not a boy in that village knew where there was 

 a nest. Oh, no, not one ! A man confessed to 

 the guilty secret, and, directed by him, we took 

 a long walk through the village with its queer 

 little houses, many of them having the two front 

 doors which tell the tale of Mormondom within ; 

 up the long sidewalk, with a beautiful bounding 

 mountain brook running down the gutter, as if 

 it were a tame irrigating ditch, to a big gate in 

 a " combination fence." What this latter might 

 be we had wondered, but relied upon knowing 

 it when we saw it, and we did : it was a fence 

 of laths held together by wires woven between 

 them, and we recognized the fitness of the name 



