HIDDEN TREASURE 87 
quiet, I never would have learned her secret. When, 
however, she came back, flying from branch to branch 
with fluttering wings and jerking tail, keeping up at 
the same time a rattle of alarm-notes like a tiny 
machine-gun, even a novice like myself would sus- 
pect a nest. 
Fortunately a broken hazel bush marked the exact 
spot from which she had flown. On going there, 
and looking carefully near its base, I found what has 
always seemed to me one of the most beautifully 
hidden nests of all the hundreds which I have seen 
since — perhaps because it was my first rare nest. It 
was roofed in by the split hazel-branch, and made of 
woven dry grass and leaves, with a scanty lining of 
horse-hair and a flooring of leaf-fragments. Inside 
were five eggs. Four of them were bluish-white, 
with aureoles of reddish-brown blotches around the 
blunt ends; but the fifth was larger, and was specked 
and splashed with blotches of rufous and brown- 
purple. Long afterwards I learned that this last 
egg was the fatal gift of that vampire the cow-bird, 
and that by leaving it there I had doomed the four 
legitimate future birds of that nest to certain death. 
Sooner or later the deadly changeling would hatch 
from that egg and roll its foster-brothers out of the 
nest to starve. 
That day, however, I was ignorant even of the 
name of the bird whose nest I had found. For long 
I stood and gloated like a miser over the little 
jewel-casket which the mother-bird had shown me, 
and for the first time realized that anywhere in the 
