A FAMn.Y OF LIVELY SINGERS 45 



over itself in merry cascades, so this little wren's song 

 bubbles, ripples, cascades in a niiniature torrent of ecstasy. 

 The song seems to bubble up faster than he can sing. 

 " Foive notes to wanst " was an Irishman's description of it. 

 After the wren's happy discovery of a place to live in, his 

 song will go off in a series of musical explosions all day long, 

 now from the roof, now from the clothes-posts, the fence, 

 the barn, or the wood-pile. There never was a more tire- 

 less, spirited, brilliant singer. From the intensity of his 

 feelings, he sometimes droops that expressive little tail of 

 his, which is usually so erect and saucy. 



Year after year wrens return to the same nesting places : 

 a box set up against the house, a crevice in the barn, a 

 niche under the eaves; but once home, always home to 

 them. The nest is kept scrupulously clean; the house- 

 cleaning, like the house-building and renovating, being 

 accompanied by the cheeriest of songs, that makes the bird 

 fairly tremble by its intensity. But however angelic the 

 voice of the house wren, its temper can put to flight even 

 the English sparrow. Nevertheless, it is a safe precaution 

 in making wren houses to cut the entrance hole no larger 

 than the ring that is drawn with a pencil around a silver 

 quarter of a dollar — a hole too small for sparrows but just 

 right for wrens. They really prefer boxes to the holes in 

 stumps and trees they used to occupy before there were any 

 white people on this continent. But the little mites have 

 been known to build in tin cans, coat pockets, old shoes, 

 mittens, hats, glass jars, and even inside a human skull 

 that a medical student hung out in the sun to bleach ! 



The male begins to carry twigs into the house before he 

 finds a mate. The day little Jenny Wren appears on the 

 scene, how he does sing! Dashing off for more twigs, but 



