222 SINGING BIRDS. 



ground ; at other times, I have known the nest placed upon the 

 horizontal branch of a hornbeam, more than 15 feet from 

 the ground, or even 50 feet high in the forks of a thick sugar- 

 maple or orchard tree. These lofty situations are, however, 

 extraordinary; and the little architects, in instances of this 

 kind, sometimes fail of giving the usual security to their habita- 

 tion. The nest is extremely neat and durable ; the exterior is 

 formed of layers of Asclepias, or silk-weed lint, glutinously 

 though slightly attached to the supporting twigs, mixed with 

 some slender strips of fine bark and pine leaves, and thickly 

 bedded with the down of willows, the nankeen-wool of the Vir- 

 ginian cotton-grass, the down of fern-stalks, the hair from the 

 downy seeds of the buttonwood {Platanus) , or the pappus of 

 compound flowers ; and then hned either with fine-bent grass 

 (^Agrostis), or down, and horse-hair, and rarely with a few acci- 

 dental feathers. Circumstances sometimes require a variation 

 from the usual habits of the species. In a garden in Roxbury, 

 in the vicinity of Boston, I saw a nest built in a currant-bush, 

 in a small garden very near to the house ; and as the branch 

 did not present the proper site of security, a large floor of dry 

 grass and weeds was first made betwixt it and a contiguous 

 board fence ; in the midst of this mass of extraneous materials, 

 the small nest was excavated, then lined with a considerable 

 quantity of white horse-hair, and finished with an interior bed 

 of soft cow-hair. The season proving wet and stormy, the 

 nest in this novel situation fell over, but was carried, with the 

 young to a safe situation near the piazza of the house, where 

 the parents now fed and reared their brood. The labor of 

 forming the nest seems often wholly to devolve on the female. 

 On the I oth of May I observed one of these industrious matrons 

 busily engaged with her fabric in a low barberry bush, and by 

 the evening of the second day the whole was completed, to the 

 lining, which was made, at length, of hair and willow down, of 

 which she collected and carried mouthfuls so large that she 

 often appeared almost like a mass of flying cotton, and far ex- 

 ceeded in industry her active neighbor, the Baltimore, who 

 was also engaged in collecting the same materials. Notwith- 



