Morning Visitors. 157 
wagtail’s nest in a different part of the garden here— 
in some ivy that had grown round the decaying 
stump of an old fir tree. This bird was watched, but 
not interfered with; she came repeatedly, and was 
seen on the nest, and the egg observed. Afterwards 
a cuckoo sang continuously day after day on an ash 
tree close to the garden. 
Lower down in the ivy, behind the logs of timber 
under the casement, the hedge-sparrow builds every 
year ; and on the wood itself where the trunks formed 
a little recess was a robin’snest. The hedge-sparrow, 
unlike his noisy namesake, is one of the quietest of 
birds: he slips about in the hedges and bushes all 
round the garden so quietly and unobtrusively that 
unless you watch carefully you will not seehim. Yet 
he does not seem shy, and if you sit still will come 
along the hawthorn within a yard. 
In the thatch—under the eaves of the cellar, 
which are not more than four feet from the ground 
and come up to the ivy of the gable—the wren has a 
nest. Some birds seem always to make their nests in 
one particular kind of way, and generally in the same 
kind of tree or bush; robins, house-sparrows, and 
starlings, on the other hand, adjust their nests to all 
sorts of places. 
The window of a room in which I used to sleep 
overlooked the orchard, and there was a pear tree 
trained against the wall, some of the boughs of which 
came up to the window-sill. This pear tree acted as 
