42 



My Garden Summer-Seat. 



chaffinch might probably make use of it too. On my 

 return to Europe I watched a chaffinch busy at its 

 nest. It left it, and flew to an old wall and took a 

 cobweb from it, then conveyed it to its nest, and inter- 

 wove it with the lichen on the outside of it." 



The little busy goldcrest, very unlike the wren 

 family, to which he is related, in personal appearance, 



goes about his 

 -fT^C business in a care- 



ful cheerful man- 

 ner, and at the hot 

 hours of noon in 

 summer days 

 sends out soft 

 bursts of song, 

 when else silence 

 would almost reign 

 in garden or wood. 

 His tiny nest is 

 hung on the end 

 of the high branch of that cedar tree on the lawn, and 

 so neatly that, looking from below, you could hardly 

 see it, the feathery ends of the needles falling round it. 

 What a delight the bees have found in these fox- 

 gloves, which seem as if nature constructed them to 

 show what she could do in building a perfect floral 

 pyramid, or perhaps more properly, floral obelisk, and 

 to afford a ceaseless series of newly unfolded flowers 

 through a whole season. Unlike the grand builders of 

 the Nile, she does not aim at hard permanence here ; but 

 she combines what they did not and could not do, per- 

 fection of line and curve, and ceaseless change in sweet 

 gradation. They are now losing the lower flowers 

 that pale off and shrink away, while those at the 



GOLDCREST. 



