JS'ESTS AND THEIR LOCALITIES. 
25 
back will be warmed only by the couch on which it lies. Therefore, 
the maternal anxiety and precaution are not easily satisfied. The 
husband brings her some horse-hair, but it is too hard ; it will serve 
for nothing more than an undermost layer — a kind of elastic mattress. 
He brings hemp, but that is too frigid. Only the silk or silky fibre of 
certain wool or cotton bearing plants is admissible ; or, better still, her 
own feathers, her own down, which she plucks from her breast, and 
places beneath her nursling." 
Speaking generally, the nest or home is situated in the centre of 
the space which the bird regards as his domain, and within which he 
confines his peregrinations. Its position varies according to the habits 
of its builder. The bird of prey constructs his eyrie at a considerable 
elevation above the scnl, on the crest of a tall tree, or the rocky ledge 
of a precipice. 
" He clasp.s the crag with crooked hands, 
Close to the sun in lonely lands, 
Kinged with the azure world he stands : 
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls ; 
He watches from his mountain walls, 
And like a thunderbolt he falls." —Tennysox. 
The cursorial birds build upon the gi'ound ; the passerine, as they 
were formerly called, on the branches or in the hollows of the trees, or 
in thick leafy bushes, or among the tangles of the sheltering hedge. 
Claie has described a thrush's nest and its locality with all a 
naturalist's accuracy and a poet's feeling : — 
" Within a thick and spreading hawthorn bush 
That overhung a mole-hill, large and round, 
I heard from morn to eve a merry thrush 
Sing hymns of rapture 
I watched her secret toils from day to day ; 
How true she warped the moss to form her nest, 
And modelled it within with wood and clay. " 
The birds of the marshes construct their nests on little islets among 
the reeds, and frequently in such a manner that they float on the 
surface of the water ; while the ocean-fowls haunt the ledges, pro- 
jections, and crevices of the sea-washed cliffs. The rocky coasts of 
the Western Islands — such, for instance, as St. Kilda; or such isolated 
