softly, as she gave a graceful little shake to her fluffy brown suit and settled herself anew. Then she bent her beautiful head and gently scratched her ear with her right reversible toe.

There came no sound of wings, but the branch on which she sat quivered beneath an added weight, and she rolled her round eyes affectionately toward the new comer, a great horned owl, with a welcoming gurgle, in which was a note of expectation. Her lover was a handsome fellow, with great tufts over his ears, and he had brought a “gift for his fair,” though it was not a dainty box of bonbons produced from his overcoat pocket. He lifts his broad wings, bends his head, and produces from his crop a newly caught frog. His mistress nestles close, with fluttering wings and upturned beak, and receives the great dainty with an evident pleasure which delights him. He tries again. This time the convulsive effort brings forth to light a field mouse, garnished with two grasshoppers and a black cricket, which his lady receives with the pretty infantile attitudes and flutterings which all ladies think so becoming and attractive. Then they snuggle up close together, as is the way of lovers, and sit so still they might have been mistaken for a pair of stuffed owls—indeed one of them was—save for the occasional turning round of the head in that mechanical way affected by owls, for they are watchful, as all wood creatures have need to be.

“Why didst thou tarry so long, my brave?” she finally murmured, as she fondly toyed with the soft mottled feathers on his broad breast.

He lifted his feathery horns angrily at the remembrance. “The blue terror caught sight of me as I looked forth from the beautiful dark home in the dead oak tree which I have selected for thee, my beloved. It was just as the gaudy daylight was giving way to the pleasing blackness of night that I came forth, thinking all the little day flyers would have been asleep, but a belated bluejay saw me and, with lifted crest and shrill voice, raised the hue and cry. The robin left his mud daubed nest in the orchard across the road, the titmouse from his home in the knot hole of the rail fence, the nuthatch, the butcher bird and hosts of others all came, with piercing scoldings, sharp pecks and fluttering wings. I might have gone back into the darkness of our new home and so saved myself further annoyance, but, light of the world,” as he rolled his eyes fondly toward her, “I wanted not the blue terror to know where thou wouldst lay thine eggs—he is an egg thief, himself, thou knowest—so I sailed away into the open, and, O, the clamor they raised. And see,” showing two or three broken feathers, “what the bold blue terror has done, the strong voiced and strong winged bluejay.”

“How I wish I had been there,” muttered the lady owl vengefully through her clenched beak. “I would have torn his blue crest from his wicked little head.”

“And I would have taken his head along with it, at least as far as that black necklace of which he is so proud, if he had but given me the chance,” laughed the owl grimly. “It’s my usual way, only there were so many of the light, active little things that when I turned toward one another would come at me from the other side, so that my only safety from annoyance—for that was all they could do—was in my swift and silent wings.

“It seemed,” he went on, his great eyes blazing at the recollection, “as if all the birds in the woods joined the mob, friend and foe flying wing to wing, the most innocent seed bird and the bloodiest thief fighting side by side, and I had to buffet them with wing and claw, though they kept beyond reach of my beak,” he added proudly, and he passed his great feather-clad claw caressingly down his polished black beak, curved like a scimitar, and as strong and sharp.

“Thou knowest, my beautiful one,” he continued, “how the bluejay and the woodpecker fight one another, but tonight they joined forces as if they had been friends from the dawning of creation; and when the butcher bird cried out, ‘He ate three of my children yesterday,’ the titmouse—forgetting the thorn on which that same butcher bird impaled her first husband in the early summer—replied in fullest sympathy, ‘And he stole one of my lovely eggs only a week ago,’ and then she screamed with all her tiny might and flew at my head as boldly as if she had been an eagle. The little pests!”

“Never mind, my hero,” murmured the lady owl as fondly as a coo dove, “a man has his mosquitoes, a dog has his fleas, there is a horsefly for the horse, and these little birds are our mosquitoes, our fleas and our flies. Who-who-who,” she stammered in her rhetorical flight; “who has not his troubles in this world?”

“Who-who-who,” echoed the owl.

S. E. McKee.

TO A NUTHATCH.

THE BROWN-HEADED NUTHATCH.
(Sitta pusilla.)

Of the twenty species of nuthatches known to inhabit the temperate regions of the Northern hemisphere, but four are distinctively American. They are classed by ornithologists with the tits and chickadees in the family Paridæ, a word derived from the Latin parus, meaning a titmouse. The nuthatches, like the woodpeckers, are climbers, but unlike the latter they climb downward as well as upward and with equal facility. Their tails are very short and are not used for support. Their bodies also do not touch the tree “unless they are suddenly affrighted, when they crouch and look, with their beaks extended, much like a knot with a broken twig to it.” A sudden clapping of the hands or a sharply spoken word will often cause a nuthatch to assume this attitude. They are busy birds, yet they are seldom too absorbed in their work of gathering food to stop and closely scrutinize an intruder. “Few birds are easier to identify: the woodpecker pecks, the chickadee calls ‘chickadee,’ while the nuthatch, running up and down the tree trunks, assumes attitudes no bird outside of his family would think of attempting.”

They do not always seek their food in the crevices of the bark of trees but, flycatcher-like, will fly outward from their perch and catch insects on the wing. Mr. James Newton Baskett relates the following interesting observation: “One spring day some little gnats were engaged in their little crazy love waltzes in the air, forming little whirling clouds, and the birds left off bark-probing and began capturing insects on the wing. They were awkward about it with their short wings and had to alight frequently to rest. I went out to them and so absorbed were they that they allowed me to approach within a yard of a limb that they came to rest upon, where they would sit and pant till they caught their breath, when they