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Updated: July 23, 2025
"You're a lovely mother-bird!" cried Dolly, "and not foolish a bit! but, oh, do decide positively, for I can't wait another minute to tell Dot, if I'm going." "Very well," said Mrs. Fayre, "run along and tell Dotty, and Bernice, too." Dolly made a jump and two hops for the telephone, and soon the wires must have bent under the weight of joyous exclamations. "Oh, Dolly, isn't it fine!"
This is a pretty little black beetle, with a pale, velvety abdomen; a spherical insect, as large as a biggish cherry-stone. Its official title is Bolboceras gallicus, Muls. By rubbing the end of the abdomen against the edge of the wing-cases it produces a gentle chirping sound like the cheeping of nestlings when the mother-bird returns to the nest with food.
It is an old tomato-can; a robin has built her nest in it; there are three dear little birds inside; the mother-bird is away, and I wanted you to come before she returned. Isn't it lucky that I should have found that? And here, in our own grounds? I don't believe there was ever another robin who made her nest in a tomato-can!"
The nest is somewhere on the outer circle of his song; he is never so imprudent as to take up his stand very near it. The artists who draw those cosy little pictures of a brooding mother-bird with the male perched but a yard away in full song, do not copy from nature. The thrasher's nest I found thirty or forty rods from the point where the male was wont to indulge in his brilliant recitative.
I have never seen anything equal to this; but one day, happening to stop under a low cedar, I discovered right over my head a waxwing's nest with the mother-bird sitting upon it, while her mate was perched beside her on the branch.
He says the mother-bird lays a single egg, and sits upon it a number of days before laying the second, so that he has seen one young bird nearly grown, a second just hatched, and a whole egg all in the nest at once. "So far as I have seen, this is the settled practice, the young leaving the nest one at a time to the number of six or eight.
According to the ideas of all who knew her, save her father and Myra Longman, Tessibel was full of eccentric traits; for who but Tess would feel the "mollygrubs," as Ben Letts had said, at the wriggling of the agonized perch and pickerel, as they flopped painfully upon the sands; or who but Tess would mind the squeaking of the mother-bird calling for her own.
He will hear her voice, now eagerly pleading with friend or wrong-doer, now brooding tender as a mother-bird over some fledgling soul, now broken with sobs as she mourns over the sins of Church and world, and again chanting high prophecy of restoration and renewal, or telling in awestruck undertone sacred mysteries of the interior life.
He who cares for the sparrow would not allow the mother-bird to suffer by perhaps seeing her little ones die while she was shut up in a cage, too fluttered and frightened to help them; and He would teach us to be merciful and tender-hearted towards those who cannot defend themselves or plead their own cause, "even as our Father in heaven is merciful."
It was exactly a week ago to-day it began, while they were making the birthday presents together, Margaret sitting in this very chair and Nell the Enemy sitting on the toppest door-step. Who would have thought it was coming? There was nothing to warn no thunder in the sky, no little mother-bird on the syringa bush. It just came oh, hum!
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