WOOD NOTES AND NEST HUNTING. 1 29 



burns her, and the wet leaves, in rainy weather, 

 drip, drip on her devoted back. Those horrid 

 guns and that barking dog, how dreadfully they 

 echo through the woods ! Perhaps that is a weasel 

 nosing about there in the dark ! 



Among these dangers, there is something that 

 tells her to keep those germs beneath her warm 

 for eighteen days, before they will find a voice 

 and take to themselves legs to run away. 



Further on the alders have taken the places of 

 chestnut,, oak and evergreen. WhUe wading 

 through the tail meadow rue and rough tangled 

 bed-straw, inhaling the nauseous odor of the carrion 

 flower, which grows here abundantly, and brushing 

 away the mosquitoes that rise up at every step, in 

 sufficient numbers to draw out your last drop of 

 blood, I have scared from her nest the black-billed 

 cuckoo. She flies away to an alder, uttering a few 

 guttural notes as an alarm, and then remains quiet, 

 but watching me very closely from her covert. 

 The nest is a rude affair, the outside being com- 

 posed of quite large dead twigs with leaves inter- 

 mingled. It is laid carelessly on the branches of a 

 prostrate arrow-wood, and hidden by the tangled 

 mass of weeds growing around it. Some little 

 attention is paid to the upholstering of the shallow 



