BIRD CRADLES. 109 
artfully humored by the housewife or the ornithological curio 
hunter, resulting in works of questionable art sophisticated with 
all manner of contaminations—rags and ribbons, tape and lamp- 
wick, or perhaps patriotic pendants flying the national colors of 
red, white, and blue in party-colored zones and strips of gaudy 
flannel. In contrast to these I cannot but revert with relief to 
that beautiful fancy which Chadwick has woven into one of these 
beautiful nests, and in which the intertwined golden and silvery 
locks of childhood and old age tell a pathetic story. 
In one case at least the hint of the oriole would appear to 
have been appreciated, his nest having first introduced to the 
public the utility of the black flexible compound which is so 
common an ingredient towards the centre of our costly “curled- 
hair” mattresses. 
During a recent Southern trip I noted one or two of these 
pendulous mattresses of the oriole, their black color giving little 
hint to the observer of the gray Southern moss of which they 
are really constructed. In the Long Island Historical Rooms 
there is a specimen of one of these Southern nests, fully eighteen 
inches long, composed entirely of this glossy black fibre—a veri- 
table piece of hair-cloth to all appearances, no single thread, I 
believe, showing its familiar gray complexion, the entire material 
having been presumably abstracted from the drying-poles of the 
“moss gatherers,” beneath whose arts the Southern moss is con- 
verted into “genuine curled hair” by the rotting and subsequent 
removal of the gray covering, leaving only the black shiny core, 
which is duly shipped and subsequently sold and “ warranted ” at 
fifty cents a pound. 
In strong contrast to the foregoing products of warp and 
woof is the humbler art of the plastic builders—the adobe-dwell- 
ers among our birds. Of such are the robin—true child of the 
sod, with its domicile of mud and coarse grass—and the thrushes 
generally, the phcebe, pewee, and the swallows. Solid and sub- 
stantial fair-weather structures, they are yet far inferior in the 
scale of architectural intelligence; for while in the textile nests 
even a drenching rain serves but to amalgamate the mass, the 
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