4 o 



PASTORAL DAYS. 



brook, where the burrowing kingfisher hid away his nest, where we 

 watched in the twilight to see him enter, and, with big round stone in 

 readiness, " plugged " him in his den ! What fun it was to dig him out, 

 and ventilate his musty nest of fish-bones ! The 

 _ J starling in the thicket of the swamp circled through 

 the air with angry " Quit ! quit !" as we picked our 

 way through the bristling bogs so close upon her 

 nest. We'll not forget that false step that sent us 

 sprawling in the green slimy mud, at the first 

 electrifying glimpse of those brown spotted 

 eggs. The high-holer, too, whose golden gleam 

 of wing upon the bare dead tree betrayed his nest- 

 ing-place in the hollow limb — was ever such 



a stimulus offered to 

 the eagerness of youth ? 

 Who would give a sec- 

 ond thought to his tender shins at the prospect of such 

 a prize as a nest of high-hole's eggs ? How round and 

 white they were ! how the pale golden yolk floated be- 

 neath the pearly shell ! Those were jolly clays for us ; but 

 J the poor birds had to suffer, and few, indeed, were the nests 

 that escaped our prying search. There was the cat-bird in 

 the evergreens, with lovely eggs of peacock blue ; the pure white treasures 

 of the swallows in the mud nests under the barn-yard eaves; the sky-blue 

 beauties of the robin ; the brown speckled eggs in the sheltered nest of 

 song-sparrows on the grassy slope ; the dear little eggs of chippies in their 



