ETHEL MORTON.
Looking from my study window, one day, last June, I noticed a little yellow and brown bird, who was hopping from bush to bush. She was busily chattering to another bird, who sat on a neighboring tree, evidently much enjoying a worm he was eating. I knew the pair, directly, as my friends of the season before,—the Yellow Warblers.
Mrs. Warbler was looking for a good place to build her nest. After some consideration, she decided on a bush in front of my window. Off she flew to a field of dandelions, and soon returned with several pieces of dandelion fluff. It took quite a while to complete the house, for Mrs. W. was very neat and precise in her work, but after it was finished, Mr. Warbler came over to look at it (he had left the building to his wife!), and as he seemed perfectly satisfied with it, Mrs. Warbler was happy.
Not many days after this, some pretty little blue eggs lay snugly in the nest, and Mrs. Warbler was a mother! Alas! On the day the young Warblers left their shells, their mother came home from a call on Mrs. Robin, to find her children crying most bitterly. An ugly Cowbird had dropped its great, brown, spotted egg right in their beautiful parlor! (It seems to be a custom with these birds, to leave their eggs in the nests of their unfortunate neighbors, rather than hatch them themselves.)
Poor, little Mrs. Warbler! She tried with all her strength to push the egg out of her home, but without success. So, what do you suppose she did? Why, she just built another nest on top of the old one! It was a great deal of trouble, and the young Warblers tried her patience sorely, by persisting in pulling at the threads and straws, as she wove the frame-work of her new dwelling. "Labor is its own reward," however, for there was not a happier couple in all bird land than Mr. and Mrs. Yellow Warbler, when they brought their admiring friends and relations, to see the young Warblers, in the two-storied nest.