222 
SINGING BIRDS. 
ground ; at other times, I have known the nest placed upon the 
horizontal branch of a hornbeam, more than 15 feet from 
the ground, or even 50 feet high in the forks of a thick sugar- 
maple or orchard tree. These lofty situations are, however, 
extraordinary ; and the little architects, in instances of this 
kind, sometimes fail of giving the usual security to their habita- 
tion. The nest is extremely neat and durable ; the exterior is 
formed of layers of Asclepias, or silk-weed lint, glutinously 
though slightly attached to the supporting twigs, mixed with 
some slender strips of fine bark and pine leaves, and thickly 
bedded rvith the down of willows, the nankeen-wool of the Vir- 
ginian cotton-grass, the down of fern-stalks, the hair from the 
downy seeds of the buttonwood (Platanus) , or the pappus of 
compound flowers ; and then lined either wdth fine-bent grass 
{Agrostis) , or down, and horse-hair, and rarely with a few acci- 
dental feathers. Circumstances sometimes require a variation 
from the usual habits of the species. In a garden in Roxbury, 
in the vicinity of Boston, I saw a nest built in a currant-bush, 
in a small garden very near to the house ; and as the branch 
did not present the proper site of security, a large floor of dry 
grass and weeds was first made betwixt it and a contiguous 
board fence ; in the midst of this mass of extraneous materials, 
the small nest was excavated, then lined with a considerable 
quantity of white horse-hair, and finished with an interior bed 
of soft cow-hair. The season proving wet and stormy, the 
nest in this novel situation fell over, but was carried, with the 
young to a safe situation near the piazza of the house, where 
the parents now fed and reared their brood. The labor of 
forming the nest seems often wholly to devolve on the female. 
On the 1 oth of May I observed one of these industrious matrons 
busily engaged with her fabric in a low barberry bush, and by 
the evening of the second day the whole was completed, to the 
lining, which was made, at length, of hair and willow down, of 
which she collected and carried mouthfuls so large that she 
often appeared almost like a mass of flying cotton, and far ex- 
ceeded in industry her active neighbor, the Baltimore, who 
was also engaged in collecting the same materials. Notwith- 
