25 B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 



should have to wait and watch , but first I sat- 

 isfied myself by a simple method that my 

 watching would probably not be in vain. A 

 little examination of the ground at the base of 

 the stump showed me a quantity of fresh wood- 

 fragments, not unlike very coarse saw-dust 

 scattered over the surface. This assured me 

 that one of the excavations above was a new 

 one, and that a nest was either building or had 

 been finished but a short while. So I hastily 

 hid myself on a log in a clump of bushes, dis- 

 tant from the stump about fifty feet, whence I 

 could plainly see the holes. 



One who has never been out alone in a 

 Southern swamp can have no fair understand- 

 ing of its loneliness, solemnity and funereal 

 sadness of effect. Even in the first gush of 

 Spring — it was now about the sixth of April — • 

 I felt the weight of something like eternity in 

 the air — not the eternity of the future but the 

 eternity of the past. Everything around me 

 appeared old, sleepy, and musty, despite the 

 fresh buds, tassels, and flower-spikes. What 

 can express dreariness so effectually as the 

 long moss of those damp woods? I imagined 

 that the few little birds I saw flitting here and 

 there in the tree tops were not so noisy and 

 joyous as they would be when, a month later, 

 their northward migration should bring them 

 into our greening northern woods. As the 

 sun mounted, however, a cheerful twitter ran 

 with the gentle breeze through the bay thickets 

 and magnolia clumps, and I recognized a 

 number of familiar voices ; then suddenly the 

 gavel of Campephilus sounded sharp and 

 strong a quarter-mile away. A few measured 

 raps, followed by a rattling drum-call, a space 



