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Peter's heart was so glad that he felt he must sing all day long, just as the birds sing for joy, but, being partly human, he needed in instrument, so he made a pipe of reeds, and he used to sit by the shore of the island of an evening, practising the sough of the wind and the ripple of the water, and catching handfuls of the shine of the moon, and he put them all in his pipe and played them so beautifully that even the birds were deceived, and they would say to each other, "Was that a fish leaping in the water or was it Peter playing leaping fish on his pipe?" and sometimes he played the birth of birds, and then the mothers would turn round in their nests to see whether they had laid an egg.
The day arrived when the dreadful combat was to take place, and thousands of people assembled in the vast amphitheatre built for the purpose, to which even the huge pyramids seemed as pismires' nests.
The starlings who, if the roof be of thatch, as it is in many farmhouses, make their nests in it occasionally carry their holes right through, and are unmercifully exterminated when they venture within reach, or they would quickly let the rain and the daylight in.
On the gate-posts, at the entrance, were the nests of two oven-birds, like those we had already seen on the telegraph-posts, so exactly spherical as to look like ornaments. In one of the shrubberies a fine jaguar was shut up in a cage, who looked very like a tiger.
The swallows want a sleepy old town with big thunderful chimneys, where there are wide fields and a patch of quiet water. Much more numerous than the swallows are the night-hawks. My roof, in fact, is the best place I have ever found to study their feeding habits. These that flit through my smoky dusk may not make city nests, though the finding of such nests would not surprise me.
Our enjoyment was owing partly to the fact that we were getting toward the end of the hard work, and partly to the bumblebees' nests we found in the swales. Moreover, when we reached that field grandmother Ruth was wont to come out to lay the last load of hay and ride to the barn on it. In former days when she and the old Squire were young she had helped him a great deal with the haying.
No matter how many or great the changes, the robins still build their nests in the elm tree, and the grass still grows to cover the earth of brown with its emerald mantle; for what care the daisies and the grapes, if the hand of the reaper bids them bow before his trusty blade? The life is at their roots, and their flowers and blades will come again.
On some single trees, upwards of one hundred nests were found, each containing one young only, a circumstance in the history of this bird not generally known to naturalists.
A strange confusion of indistinct and broken sounds, issuing from myriads of nests and perches all along the beach, showed that the various tribes of sea-fowl were beginning to bestir themselves.
I may perhaps push "protection" too far sometimes, for it is my hobby just now, but as the lion and the tiger are, I think, the only two non-arboreal cats, I think the tiger stripe agreeing so well with its usual habitat is at least a probable case. I am rewriting my article on Birds' Nests for the new Natural History Review.
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