NOTES AND QUERIES. 357 
one in 1893, which is now in the Oxford Museum; and on the 2lst I 
found another, containing one egg, in the identical spot almost to a square’ 
yard where I found one in 1895 (June 26th). This close adherence to the 
same site year after year has also been noticed by my friend Mr. Playne 
near Bristol. The same day a young friend from Oxford, whom I had 
invited to study the bird, discovered a third nest with four eggs in a new 
site. This was a little further from the edge of the osier-bed than has so 
far been the case; but my experience entirely confirms Mr. Seebohm’s 
statement (or rather that of his German informant) that it is almost useless 
to look for the nest in the centre of any dense thicket. All the eggs were 
very characteristic, of a clear greenish or bluish white ground colour; but 
the spots and blotches were somewhat larger and more numerous in one 
clutch than in the others. On the 25th Mr. O. V. Aplin came to look at 
these three nests, and we had the pleasure of a leisurely inspection of the 
sitting bird in two cases out of the three. Looked at from a yard or so 
away, the colour of the back is a light uniform neutral brown, with a shade 
of olive, and the eye-stripe is only discernible when looked for closely ; it 
passes not over the eye, as described in Mr. Howard Saunders’s ‘ Manual,’ 
but through it. By this time the nest which, when I originally observed 
it, had one egg only, contained three, but the previous day there had been 
four. ‘This nest differed from the others in having more or less wool in its 
composition, and a large loose lump of wool in the lining. This attracted 
my attention, for I had never seen wool in a Marsh Warbler’s nest before ; 
there is sometimes a little moss, and this was the case also with the nest of 
which I am speaking We saw a Cuckoo this day at the osier-bed, and I 
had seen one there once or twice before ; but it did not occur to me as yet 
to associate the disappearance of an egg or the peculiar make of the nest 
with the presence of this mischief-maker. But on the 27th, when I next 
looked at the nest, there were only two eggs, and my suspicions began to 
be aroused, for there was no sign that any human being had been to the 
spot. On the morning of the 28th the bird was no longer sitting, and the 
eggs were all gone. There was no trace of them underneath the nest, 
among the roots of the meadow-sweet, in which this nest, like all the others 
this year, had been built. On examining the nest more closely I thought 
I saw something at the very bottom, underneath the lining, which as usual 
was of dry grass and horsehair, with the addition, as I have said, of some 
wool and a few minute fragments of moss, and, putting in my finger, I felt 
an egg. I then cut away the meadow-sweet, with the nest in it, and, getting 
it into a good light, could see a Cuckoo's egg, of the greenish-brown type 
often found in the nest of the Reed Warbler and other birds, almost hid- 
den, and quite firmly fixed below the lining. The nest could be held upside 
down without displacing the egg, which occupied a small’ hole or chamber 
