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Updated: June 27, 2025
But the fact that it may under stress of circumstances eventuate in inanities no more disproves the presence of the instinct than the reality of the brooding instinct is disproved by inducing a hen to sit on a nestful of china eggs.
The air became charged again with the odour of burned feathers, and he saw that a handful, with the dried blood of the fowl still adhering to them, had been scattered upon the ashes. As he idly noted the colours of red and black, he remembered with bitterness that he had raised game-cocks once when he was a boy at the Hall, and that Maria had smashed a nestful of his eggs in a fit of passion.
"Yes, sir," he continued, "I want one of those eggs, and what is more, I am going to have one." He half closed his eyes and tipped his head back and swallowed a couple of times, as if he already tasted one of those eggs. "There is more in one of those eggs than in a whole nestful of Welcome Robin's eggs.
He moved on, and on; ceaseless, unresting, in widening circles, in zigzagging paths that led to no issue; he struggled on wearily with a set, distressed face behind which, in his tired brain, seethed his thoughts: restless, sombre, tangled, chilling, horrible and venomous, like a nestful of snakes.
A sentiment of altruism seems indeed not unknown, as I have seen a female give a grub to one of a hungry nestful, before passing on to brood her own eggs, yet unhatched.
I had not long been seated on a garden bench when a daw came flying to a tree close by and began craning her neck and eyeing me with one eye, then the other, with an intense, almost painful curiosity; and these nervous movements and gestures immediately revealed to me that she had a nestful of young birds somewhere close by.
The under one of the pile seemed entirely contented to be at the bottom, and the top ones not to exult in their position; in fact, so far as any show of interest in life was concerned, they might have been a nestful of wooden babies. On this morning, as we dragged ourselves wearily over the hot road to the ravine, we resolved that no handful of wrenlings should force us over that road again.
Here, a wide coulée lay yawning languorously in the sunshine with a gossipy trout stream for company; with meadowlarks rippling melodiously from bush and weed or hunting worms and bugs for their nestful of gaping mouths; with gophers trailing snakily through the tall grasses; and out in the barren centre where the yellow earth was pimpled with little mounds, plump-bodied prairie dogs sitting pertly upon their stubby tails the while they chittered shrewishly at the world; and over all a lazy, smiling sky with clouds always drifting and trailing shadows across the prairie-dog towns and the coulée and the creek, and a soft wind stirring the grasses.
Sometimes he sends none at all, and at another time he sends a nestful; it all depends on the mood you catch him in. He likes you to leave it all to him, and if you mention particularly that you hope he will see his way to making it a boy this time, he is almost sure to send another girl.
She must be disciplined to civility at all costs. Max had been wrong to yield to her sick whims. I must have sung for a long time, to judge by the amount of work I contrived to do, and if I had sung like a whole nestful of skylarks I could not have pleased my audience more.
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