HIDDEN TREASURE 93 
with my hands, I have no manner of doubt that she 
would have struck me with her beak. 
In only one other instance in many years of bird’s- 
nesting have I ever been actually attacked by a nest- 
ing bird. Once in the twilight I had found my first 
and last nest of a Kentucky warbler on the edge of 
a wood. Taking a short cut through the trees, I was 
instantly assailed by a pair of screech-owls, which 
flew directly at my face, snapping their beaks and 
making little wailing notes. The light was so dim 
and their flight so swift, that I actually ran out into 
the open, fearing lest they might land with beak or 
claw on my eyes. 
It was on the third day that I found in a white- 
thorn bush the little horse-hair nest of the chipping 
sparrow. This last summer, in the depths of Northern 
Canada, while hunting for such rare nests as the bay- 
breasted, the yellow-palm and the Tennessee war- 
blers, I found the same little horse-hair home of the 
chipping sparrow. I thought with this my last, as 
I did with my first, that there are no eggs of Amer- 
ican birds more beautiful than those little blue, 
brown-flecked eggs of the dear gentle little chippy. 
That same day, on the edge of the thick woods near 
the schoolhouse, I found swinging from maple sap- 
lings, four and five feet from the ground, the beauti- 
ful little woven baskets, thatched on the outside with 
white birch-bark and lined within with pine-needles, 
of the red-eyed vireo, with the black line through 
and the white line above her red eye. In the vast, 
bare hardhack pasture on the slope of Pond Hill, 
