PHASES OF BIRD LIFE. l8l 



in my neighborhood, both summer and winter ; but 

 my quest was rewarded in two instances during the 

 spring of 1893, — the first nest being in the top of 

 a truncated sassafras-tree. The snag was perhaps 

 twenty feet high. On one of my visits the birds 

 were hollowing out their little apartment. They 

 would dart into the narrow opening, and presently 

 emerge, carrying small fragments of partly decayed 

 wood in their beaks and dropping them to the 

 ground. Some weeks later, I climbed the tree (with 

 much fear and trembling, be it said), but the birds 

 had made the cavity so deep that I could not see 

 the bottom, and break open their sylvan nursery I 

 would not. The second titmouse nest was in a 

 very slender branch of a sassafras- tree, — so slender, 

 indeed, that it was a wonder the birds were able to 

 make a hollow in it. At first it looked precisely 

 like a black patch burned on the bough's surface. 

 When one of the feathered atoms stood in the tiny 

 doorway and looked out, she made a pretty picture, 

 — one that would have put a throb of joy into an 

 artist's bosom. 



Yet there is another picture that I should prefer 

 to have painted, not on account of its attractiveness, 

 but on account of its quaintness ; it was the nest, 

 eggs, and young of a pair of green herons in an 

 orchard. The nest was built high, in an apple-tree, 

 and was only a loose platform of sticks. Although 

 anything but an expert climber, I contrived to scale 

 that tree three times to satisfy my curiosity. The 

 first time there were four eggs of a greenish-blue 



