98 
OUR HOME BIRDS. 
words, you see, have been set to the bobolink’s 
music. 
“ As the song tells you,” continued the governess, 
“ these birds make their nests on the ground, gener- 
ally in a field of grass ; for they complain, 
1 The haymakers scatter our young 
and it certainly seems a very unsafe place in which 
td bring up a family. The outside of the nest is 
made of dry leaves and coarse grass, while the in- 
side is lined with fine stalks of the same placed 
very close together. There ^are five eggs, of a 
bluish-white, dotted with irregular spots of dark 
brown. 
“Unfortunately for this merry little bird, he is 
very good to eat, and in the early fall he gets so 
fat on the reeds or wild oats along the shores of 
the Schuylkill and Delaware that the sound of the 
sportsman’s gun is almost constantly heard. The 
market-stalls are ornamented with long strings of 
reed-birds; and this is quite a sad sight to those 
who have w r atched the frolicsome little warblers en- 
joying their short lives.” 
