BIRD’S-NESTING 103 
To-day the first nest discovered was that of the 
junco, or slate-colored snowbird, whose jingling little 
song and the flutter of whose white skirts were every- 
where throughout the woods. This one was close 
to the camp, hollowed out of the side of a bank of 
pine-needles, and held four white eggs sparsely 
spotted with reddish-brown. The little mother-bird 
chipped frantically, with a clicking note which the 
Architect said always made him think that she car- 
ried pebbles in her throat. 
There were trillions of trilliums, as the Artist 
remarked epigrammatically. Some were the common 
trilliums, of a dark garnet-red. Besides these we 
found many of the rarer painted trilliums — a pure 
white triangle with a stained crimson reversed tri- 
angle in the centre. All of the trilliums are studies 
in triangles. The painted trillium has the crimson 
triangle in the centre, set on the white triangle 
made up of three petals which, in their turn, are fixed 
in a reversed triangle of green sepals, and the whole 
blossom is set in a still larger triangle made up of 
three green leaves. Everywhere the woods were full 
of purple-pink rhodora, the earliest of the azaleas. Its 
blossoms were silver flecked with deeper-colored spots. 
The next nest found was to me the most eventful 
one of the day, although not an especially rare one 
on that mountain. The Architect was walking beside 
one of the strange hummocks which are thought to 
have been formed by buried tree-trunks in the path 
of some old-time cyclone. Suddenly his eye was 
caught by the gleam of four sky-blue eggs shining 
