108 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 
The next day we were back in Philadelphia and 
summer again, with a list of seventy-six different 
kinds of birds identified on the trip and a total of 
ten nests found. 
A few days later I went bird’s-nesting with an- 
other friend in the very heart of the city of Cam- 
den. Through the manufacturing district a sluggish 
creek winds its way past factory after factory. There, 
under a clump of golden-rod leaves, he showed me 
the nest of a spotted sandpiper, made of reeds lined 
with grass, containing four eggs — dark-brown eggs, 
spotted at the larger end with chocolate marks, and 
coming to a sharp point at the other end. Later on, 
I found another nest in the middle of a mass of 
horse-tail. Then, in the very centre of a base-ball 
diamond, not far from second base, on the naked 
ground, he showed me a killdeer’s nest — a hollow 
scraped in the gravel, with four eggs which so 
matched the stones that they had escaped the notice 
of the players all around them. On the bank of the 
creek we found song sparrows’ nests, and out in a 
patch of marsh, on the very last tussock, the dried- 
grass nest of a swamp sparrow, which was much 
thicker than the song sparrow’s, while the four eggs 
were of a marbled warm brown and white. 
Then we pushed on, still in the city limits, until 
we came to an old quarry-bed half-filled with water, 
which had turned into a noisome bit of marshland. 
Pushing a rickety raft out through the muck and wa- 
ter-reeds of the stagnant water, my friend showed me, 
on a clump of pickerel weed on a sunken stick, a nest 
