Mistress Cuckoo 



possibly chill the life out of their prospective 

 brothers and sisters. In such extremity she 

 may well vote family life a failure. Do what 

 she will, it may cause some of the brood to 

 perish ; and even if she succeeds in making the 

 two ends meet, she is all the time in a desper- 

 ate anxiety. As the historian would say, this 

 is no fancy sketch. Nests are sometimes found 

 with birdlings in different stages of develop- 

 ment, and eggs still unhatched. 



Placed in such a predicament, who can blame 

 Mistress Cuckoo for retaliating on Nature, as 

 it were, and offsetting one abnormality by 

 another? Still, the American species are not 

 commonly deterred from maintaining the house- 

 hold, and they cherish their offspring with the 

 same affection that other birds display. But 

 we can hardly wonder if, with the memory of 

 previous disastrous experience, they now and 

 then seek a happy issue out of all their troubles 

 by passing over an egg or two to the charitable 

 offices of another bird. 



Moreover, as regards the fault of eating eggs 

 in others' nests, the discredit of American 

 cuckoos is quite out of proportion to their 

 off'ence. It is chiefly the prevalence of the un- 

 natural habit in European species that has, as 

 107 



