82 TRAGEDY IN THE NEST. 
would have said it was the egg of a meadow- 
pipit, perhaps. 
And indeed at that moment one of the two 
meadow-pipits who had been there just before 
attacking her ought to have been there then, 
for she slid on quick wings down to their 
nest, she placed therein her egg, which she 
had been carrying in her beak, among the 
meadow-pipit’s eggs, and—she fled, quick, 
silent, secret, and sinful, as she had come. 
The cuckoo passed, a bad and silent memory 
—except that she bubbled like a water-bottle 
—accompanied by her husband, her latest 
one, the one of the moment, with his eter- 
nal ‘Cuckoo! cuck-cuckoo! cuckoo!’ and the 
cloud of small birds who always mob a cuckoo 
because it’s like a hawk—which is no reason 
that I can see—followed him. 
Two hours later the everlasting drowsy hum 
of the insects was broken by a distant dis- 
cordant ‘Cuckoo! cuckoo!’ coming closer 
from the direction the cuckoos had not gone. 
Other cuckoos were coming, and they came, 
stealthy, shifting, shiftless gray shapes as ever 
—different cuckoos, though. 
The play was repeated. The hen-cuckoo 
flew wildly about with her egg in her beak. 
It became a case of ‘any port in a storm,’ 
and spying the meadow-pipit’s nest, she 
