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some instances it has been known, when placed in or against 
the branch of a tree, to be in some degree fastened to it by 
a twining and lacing of the larger of the materials of which 
it is composed, and in one case, the space between the branch 
of a tree, on which one was placed, and a wall, was filled 
up with straw and hay. It is made of roots, small twigs, 
and stalks of grass, with perhaps some lichens or fern, and 
is covered on the inside with mud, and lined with finer parts 
of the other materials and grass; it is sometimes most admirably 
hidden in a hollow in a bank, so as almost to baffle detection. 
It is at, times placed on the top of. a fence or the summit 
of a wall: the same situation is occasionally resorted to from 
year to year. N. Rowe, Esq., of Worcester College, Oxford, 
writes me word of a pair of Blackbirds which built their nest 
in the same spot in a laurel tree that had been previously 
tenanted the same year by a pair of Greenfinches, who in 
their turn had succeeded a pair of Thrushes. The female sits 
for thirteen days. 
The eggs are commonly five in number, sometimes four, 
and sometimes, though but rarely, six; they are of a dull 
light blue or greenish brown colour, mottled and spotted with 
pale reddish brown, the markings being closer at the larger 
end, where they sometimes form an obscure ring. Mr. 
Hewitson, in his £ Coloured Illustrations of the Eggs of 
British Birds, 5 figures one elegantly covered over at the larger 
end with minute reddish brown specks, and likewise, but less 
thickly, over the remainder—the green shewing through; and 
a second curiously marbled with irregular dashes and specks 
of reddish brown over the green colour. Another variety is 
similar to the last, except that the ground colour is lighter, 
and the spots smaller. Another, in his possession, clear 
spotless light blue, with the whole of the larger end suffused 
with reddish brown. J. B. Ellman, Esq., of Battel, relates 
in the ‘Zoologist,’ page 2180, that he had an egg in which 
the spots were at the smaller end. 
The Rev. G. Sowden, of Stainland, near Halifax, writes me 
word that he has twice met with the variety of the egg 
which resembles that of the Thrush, namely, in being of a 
fine blue colour and without spots, and he has obligingly 
forwarded two specimens of them to me. One of the nests 
which contained them was on a ledge in a very high wall 
in a quarry. 1ST. Rowe, Esq. tells me that he has taken 
similar ones of an uniform dull blue. Some of the eggs are 
