But it was reserved for my third pair of tits to give me a genuine surprise. I had been so constant a visitor at their house that I had come to feel myself quite on terms of intimacy with them. So, after their brood was hatched, I one day climbed into the tree (as I had done more than once before), the better to overlook their parental labors. I had hardly placed myself in a comfortable seat before the couple returned from one of their foraging expeditions. The male--or the one that I took for such--had a black morsel of some kind in his bill, which, on reaching the tree, he passed over to his mate, who forthwith carried it into the hollow stub, in the depths of which the hungry little ones were. Then the male flew off again, and presently came back with another beakful, which his helpmeet took from him at the door, where she had been awaiting his arrival. After this performance had been repeated two or three times, curiosity led me to stand up against the stub, with my hand resting upon it; at which the female (who was just inside the mouth of the cavity) slipped out, and set up an anxious _chickadee, dee, dee_. When her mate appeared,--which he did almost immediately,--he flew into what looked like a downright paroxysm of rage, not against me, but against the mother bird, shaking his wings and scolding violently. I came to the unhappy lady's relief as best I could by dropping to the ground, and within a few minutes the pair again approached the stub in company; but when the female made a motion to take the food from her husband's bill, as before, he pounced upon her spitefully, drove her away, and dived into the hole himself. Apparently he had not yet forgiven what he accounted her pusillanimous desertion of her charge. All in all, the scene was a revelation to me, a chickadee family quarrel being something the like of which I had never dreamed of. Perhaps no titmouse ever before had so timorous a wife. But however that might be, I sincerely hoped that they would not be long in making up their difference. I had enjoyed the sight of their loving intercourse for so many weeks that I should have been sorry indeed to believe that it could end in strife. Nor could I regard it as so unpardonable a weakness for a bird to move off, even from her young, when a man put his fingers within a few inches of her. Possibly she ought to have known that I meant no mischief. Possibly, too, her doughty lord would have behaved more commendably in the same circumstances; but of that I am by no means certain. To borrow a theological term, my conception of bird nature is decidedly anthropomorphic, and I incline to believe that chickadees as well as men find it easier to blame others than to do better themselves.