58 
HOUSE & GARDEN 
fr 
Have the gladness of 
your gifts extend into 
the year. 
For Christmas give a 
Gift Box of 25 vari¬ 
eties of Gladioli. Post 
paid $ 1.00. 
Let Nature Enhance Your Christmas Gift 
Glad flowers of the Summer Garden brilliant effective 
dainty-alluring every shade that blows and grows! Will renew 
the joy of Christmas, months afterwards, in the heart of your 
friends or those you love. 
Order your Gift Boxes to be shipped at once to you post paid, or, with your 
card enclosed, direct to your friends a few days before Christmas. 
B. HAMMOND TRACY 
Box 17, WENHAM, MASS. 
Exclusively 
Whoever pos¬ 
sesses this house 
will be certain to 
have at least one 
of these desir¬ 
able birds malts 
use of It. 
No. 63—Wren. 
Robin, $1.50 
— - mut) 
Bird,” $1.25 
“A Bluebird for 
II a p p i n ess,” 
a dash of color 
and cheerfulness, 
darting thru 
one’s vision or 
hopping upon the 
lawn. 
No. 8—“Martin House,” 14 Rooms, $20 
Kedbreast, 
the hero of many 
a nursery song 
and fable. An 
agreeable friend 
and neighbor. 
The tap, tap, tap 
of the Wood¬ 
pecker is a pleas¬ 
ing sound. A ben¬ 
efit to the trees 
of his neighbor¬ 
hood, destroying 
harmful insect 
life. 
The house for 
the companion¬ 
able Wren may be 
placed 
under 
cornice 
or porch 
or as 
near the 
house 
as de¬ 
sired. 
No. 25—“Wood¬ 
pecker,” $1.25 
No 17—“Bracket 
Wren House,” $1.00 
These houses should always be large. This is 
a bird that loves much company. If well housed 
and well used, they come in larger flocks each 
year. 
Splendid Xmas 
Gifts 
G IVE your friends a birdhouse from 
“Birdville.” Enable them to adorn 
their grounds and gardens while 
securing the friendship of “Jennie” 
Wren, “Boy” Bluebird and their rela¬ 
tions. A gift of a birdhouse besides its 
intrinsic, decorative value, also bestows 
upon those you love, the friendship and 
company of birds. 
Write now for any of the houses pictured or 
for our catalog which allows a large range of 
selection. If you so desire, we can send the 
houses direct a few days before Christmas with 
your card enclosed. Address 
A. P. GREIM 
BIRDVILLE, TOMS RIVER, N. J. 
Note: Woodpecker houses are provided with 
the proper quantity of special nesting material. 
While the cost of materials for the birdhouse 
has doubled in the last five years, our prices 
are still the same. 
Doing Your Christmas Bit for the Birds 
(Continued front page 43) 
provision. Metal baskets, cleverly 
devised, are made to be attached to 
trees in convenient positions, and 
cakes of suet, containing nuts and 
seeds, may be had to fit them. Blue 
jays, woodpeckers, nuthatches and 
chickadees will not be long in find¬ 
ing such offerings. 
By such means, many birds which 
otherwise may have felt the pinch 
of hunger, may not only be helped 
through the winter, but even possibly 
be induced to stay and nest. Some, 
of course, leave for their northern 
forests at the approach of spring, 
but the song sparrow, goldfinch, blue 
jay, woodpecker, nuthatch and chicka¬ 
dee may be content to remain where 
they have passed the winter. 
But the coming of spring brings a 
great crowd of migrants to replace 
the winter visitors, and the problem 
of how to keep them arises. Food 
is now abundant, and the lunch coun¬ 
ter has lost much of its interest. At 
such a time, nothing will prove more 
attractive to birds than an inviting 
bath. Any receptacle containing 
water, provided it be placed in a well- 
shaded and reasonably secluded posi¬ 
tion, will be appreciated. The bath 
should be not more than 3" deep and 
should grade off to lesser depths if 
possible. It may be a thing of beauty 
or merely one of utility, according to 
the desire and pocketbook of the host, 
but to the birds the cooling water is 
of chief importance. 
It is to these spring migrants that 
we must look for tenants for our 
nest-boxes, and whether or not we 
are to be favored will depend, in 
some degree, on our skill in locating 
them. These shelters should be put 
up in the autumn or during the win¬ 
ter, so that the first comers will not 
be disturbed by their erection. 
Bird Houses That House 
Bird houses may range from a tin 
can nailed to a tree, to a huge affair 
designed to house a great colony of 
martins. Numerous manufacturers 
have turned their attention to this 
field, and a great variety of patterns 
is ■ available. While the roughest 
affair often is most pleasing to the 
birds, it is quite possible to erect 
houses that are both ornamental and 
serviceable at the same time. 
There are certain points, simple 
but important, to be observed in the 
placing of bird boxes. The matter of 
decoration must be entirely second¬ 
ary to that of utility, for birds will 
not always settle where we should 
wish to have them. 
In the suburbs, the house wren is 
the most likely guest. He likes a 
small box, the aperture of which 
should be the size of a silver quar¬ 
ter, to admit the wren and exclude 
the sparrow. Almost any position, 6' 
to 12' from the ground will do—on 
a pole, among the shrubbery, or even 
the side of a house or porch. 
From a considerable collection of 
bird houses, of many styles, erected 
in the New York Zoological Park for 
educational purposes, a pair of house 
wrens one summer chose a tiny cyl¬ 
inder of roofing material, not more 
than 3" in diameter. Here, within 
6 ' of interested crowds of visitors, 
two large broods of youngsters were 
successfully reared. 
Houses suitable for the use of 
wrens are equally proper for chicka¬ 
dees, and may be occupied by these 
birds. Chickadees are fond of old 
orchards, and boxes placed there are 
very likely to be tenanted. 
Bluebirds frequent orchards and pas¬ 
tures, but may sometimes be induced 
to stop in a garden. The house may 
be placed on a limb of a tree, not 
more than 15' from the ground, or 
fastened to the top of a pole or the 
wall of a building. The entrance hole 
should be 1J4", which will exclude the 
starling but, unfortunately, not the 
European house sparrow. 
The purple martin, one of the most 
useful as well as most erratic of our 
native birds, is failing alarmingly in 
numbers and already has disappeared 
from localities where it has long been 
abundant. The sparrow no doubt is 
responsible for much of the trouble. 
Martins nest in large colonies, and 
many pairs will occupy a single house. 
Such structures are usually made 
with a great number of apartments, 
each with an individual entrance. 
Martins like 2" doors, but a 1)4" 
opening keeps out starlings. The 
house should be placed on a stout pole, 
in an exposed position well away 
from trees or other obstructions. 
Martins are most curious in their 
selection of nesting sites. The 
writer knows of an instance of a 
martin house which was visited for 
several successive springs, but the 
birds always left without nesting. 
The house and surroundings never 
were altered in any way, but in 1915 
several pairs of martins stayed and 
successfully reared a large number 
of young birds, thus assuring the fu¬ 
ture continuance of the colony. 
Other birds which may occupy 
boxes suitably placed are the crested 
flycatcher, tree swallow, flicker, 
downy woodpecker, Carolina wren 
and tufted titmouse. 
With the closing of the year there 
usually come hard times for the birds 
of our Middle and Northern States. 
Now is the need and now the oppor¬ 
tunity to do your bit for them by 
erecting feeding stations for the win¬ 
try months and nest-boxes against the 
coming spring. Why not let the 
Christmas spirit pervade your 
grounds and cheer the birds even as 
it makes bright the interior of the 
human home? 
From Pine Knot Torch to Electricity 
(Continued from page 33) 
fact, together with the imperfect com¬ 
bustion resulting from the use of 
round wicks, rendered the new style 
only a degree less dim and malodor¬ 
ous than its predecessor. A new 
theory of lamp construction had been 
evolved, however, and the fact estab¬ 
lished that progress lay in the direc¬ 
tion of a closed vessel with a wick 
maintained constantly at a specific 
height above the oil level. It was 
also perceived that the smoking and 
bad odor were largely due to the 
shape of the wick, which was accord¬ 
ingly changed to a flat ribbon. With 
this improvement, the “fluid lamp,” as 
it was christened when the whale oil 
was finally exchanged for “burning 
fluid,” remained in use in some parts 
of the country up to the middle of 
the last century, when one-wick lamps 
were introduced, with a wheel and 
spindle for raising and lowering the 
wick, similar in construction to the 
device in use on kerosene lamps. 
A series of experiments in illumi¬ 
nating fluids was undertaken with the 
twofold purpose of effecting econ¬ 
omy and obtaining increased illumina¬ 
tion. The first object was attained 
with a lard-burning “solar” lamp, but 
(Continued on page 60) 
