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I have an oriole's nest sent me from Michigan on the outside of which is a bird's dried foot with a string ingeniously knotted around it. It would be difficult to tie so complicated a knot. The tragedy is easy to read. Another nest sent me from the Mississippi Valley is largely made up of fragments of fish-line with the fish-hooks on them.
They got strawberries all over their faces, and their hands, and their light dresses! This they liked so much, for they usually had to be careful. How they chatted, and one told how the squirrels lived, and another about the robins. And the Spanish Doll told how delightful it was up in the Oriole's nest. She had half a mind to hire it for the summer.
"Why, Richard," she would say to me as I rode or walked beside her, or sat at dinner in Prince George Street, "I know every twist and turn of your nature. There is nothing you could do to surprise me. And so, sir, you are very tiresome." "You once found me useful enough to fetch and carry, and amusing when I walked the Oriole's bowsprit," I replied ruefully.
Busy times, I tell you. Makes me think of the day Calvin and I wanted to rob an oriole's nest, hang-birds, we called them, and a little girl with short curls and a sunbonnet wouldn't let us do it; a girl who'd stand only a little higher than your elbow." "Mother?" asked Sylvia softly. Jacob Johnson nodded, and they sat down to breakfast.
Then she had ripped a square of silk from the cloak which she had shaped cunningly like a deep pocket, binding it securely into the fiber rim by thrusting holes through the silk and running bits of the green fiber through like pack thread. The final result looked something less like a bucket than some strange oriole's hanging nest. "It will hold water," vowed Betty, ready for argument.
As it was, they sometimes nearly spilled out, and saved themselves only by clinging to the firm sticks and twigs. So it would seem that their home was a good sort for the needs of their early life, just as it was; and no doubt a heron's nest for a heron is as suitable a building as an oriole's is for an oriole.
In one of these the lady of the house, who was sitting out of doors, kindly beckoned us to enter, and we had the pleasure of listening, under some splendid oaks, to the oriole's song, and of seeing a little cluster of Eucalyptus trees, two surprises we had not looked for.
"How much good has it done you trying for it?" Tom asked. "Nobody is supposed to go after a thing in scouting the same as he does in a game. He's supposed to learn things why he's going after something," he added in his clumsy way. "You went through the bird study test and you didn't even know it was an oriole's nest that you rescued.
You're a naturalist." "It's an oriole's nest," Tom said, with just a note of good-humored impatience in his voice. "I thought you'd know that." "You see my head is full of the Eagle badge just now," Hervey pleaded, "but I'm going to look up orioles." Tom smiled. "I'm going to look up orioles, and I'm going to get Doc to put some iodine on my leg, and I'm going to do that tracking stunt to-morrow.
You like to remember the spring. It is the beginning. When the daisy first peeps, when the tall young deer first stands upon its feet, when the first egg is seen in the oriole's nest, when the sap first sweats from the tree, when you first look into the eye of your friend these you want to remember...."
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