not see her, then hurried along the limb in which the flycatcher lay concealed and circled around the hole, all the time endeavoring to take a peep on the inside without herself being observed, in the vain hope that her enemy might not be at home. Suddenly there would be a flutter of wings and a brown streak through the air, followed by another as the flycatcher, shot like a bullet from the opening in the tree; but the active marauder was safely hidden amid the grapevines, and the baffled flycatcher returned to his picket line, hurling back epithets and telling Jenny that he would surely catch her next time. In this manner the strife continued for several days. Then a truce seemed to have been arranged. Certainly the flycatcher was still on guard, but the wrens went about their work and did not molest the flycatchers except at long intervals. I thought the flycatchers had conquered; but one morning when I came out, there on the walk were three broken, brown-penciled eggs, nest, snakeskin, and all. The flycatcher had put too much trust in the wren's unconcernedness, and came back to find himself once more without a nest. But Jenny seemed to have desired only one more stroke of revenge, and the flycatchers finally succeeded in raising their family in front of the home of Jenny Wren. +----------------------------------------------------------------- + | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. | | | | Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant | | form was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed. | | | | Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained. | | | | Mid-paragraph illustrations have been moved between paragraphs | | and some illustrations have been moved closer to the text that | | references them. | | | | Italicized words are surrounded by underline characters, | | _like this_. | | | | The Contents table was added by the transcriber. | | | | The chapter on "An Abandonned Home" is continued in | | Vol. V., No. 5, page 198. | +------------------------------------------------------------------+ End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Birds and All Nature, Vol. V, No. 4, April 1899, by Various