BIRD CURIOS. 27 



number of species of birds. But the snow-storms 

 and fierce northern blasts that came later were very 

 hard on both birds and buds. Many a chorus was 

 sung during the pleasant weather, but on more than 

 one day afterward the cheerful voices of the feathered 

 choir were hushed, while the songsters themselves 

 sought refuge from the storm in every available 

 nook, where they sat shivering. One cannot always 

 repress the interrogatory why Nature so frequently 

 stirs hopes only to blast them ; but it is not the 

 business of the empirical observer to question her 

 motives or her manners, — rather to study her as 

 she is, without asking why. 



Cold as April was, some birds were hardy enough 

 to go to nest- building. Among these were the robins, 

 whose blushing bosoms could be seen everywhere in 

 grove and field. On the seventh of the month a 

 robin was carrying grass fibres to a half-finished nest 

 in the woodland near my house. A week later she 

 was sitting on the nest, hugging her eggs close 

 beneath her warm bosom, while the tempests howled 

 mercilessly about her roofless homestead. It seemed 

 to me, one cold morning after a snow-storm, that her 

 body shivered as she sat there, and I feared more 

 than once that she would freeze to death ; but no 

 such fatality befell her, and she resolutely kept her 

 seat in her adobe cottage. 



And this reminds me of a bird tragedy described 

 to me by a professor in the college located in my 

 town. He said that a number of years ago a robin 

 built a nest in a tree not far from the site on which 



