other bird, even after I had seen his white breast, his tune--with which he was literally spilling over--continued to sound amazingly Nashvillian; though there are few warbler songs with which I should have supposed myself more thoroughly acquainted than with this same clearly characterized Nashville ditty,--a hurried measure followed by a still more hurried trill. Perhaps this particular cerulean had a note peculiarly his own. I should be glad to think so. Perhaps, on the other hand, the fault was all with the man who heard it; in which case the less said the better. In either event, my theory as to the cerulean’s commonness was in a fair way to be verified. It was well I had that comfort. Before I could get down the hill again I must stop to listen to a gnatcatcher’s squeaky voice, and the next moment I saw the bird, and another with him. The second one proceeded immediately to a nest,--conspicuously displayed on an oak branch,--while her mate hovered about, squeaking in the most affectionate manner. Then away they flew in company, and after a long absence were back again for another turn at building. They were making a joy of their labor, the male especially; but it is true he made little else of it. With him I was at once taken captive,--so happy, so proud, and so devoted. A paragon of amorous behavior, I called him; having the French idea of “assistance,” no doubt, but a lover in every movement. Never was the good old-fashioned phrase “waiting upon her” more prettily illustrated. Birds are imaginative creatures, says Richard Jefferies, and I believe it; and this fellow, I am sure, had endowed his spouse with all the graces of all the birds that ever were or ever will be. In other words, he was truly in love. The nest was already shingled throughout with bits of gray lichen, laid on so skillfully that Father Time himself might have done it. That is the right way. Let the house look as if it were a growth, a something native to the spot, only less old than the ground it rests on. The gnatcatcher’s nest is always a work of art. Gnatcatcher eggs could hardly be counted upon to hatch in any other. As I passed up the road, on my way homeward, a flock of eight night-hawks were swimming overhead. Their genius runs, not to architecture, but to grace of aerial motion. They do not shoot like the swifts, nor skim and dart like the swallows, nor circle on level wings like the hawks, but have an easy, slow-seeming, wavering, gracefully “limping” flight, which is strictly their own. At the same time two buzzards met in midair, one going with the breeze, the other against it. I could have told the fact, without other knowledge of the wind’s course, by the different carriage of the two pairs of wings. So “the bird trims her to the gale.”