You must go in a boat and hug the shore; of course you need a member of the club for guide; at an unexpected moment you are told to look over your head, and there, glued to a shelf of rock so small as to be entirely covered by the same, is the nest! No porch, or even doorstep, beyond its wall—an overhanging roof of rock above, a shoreless expanse of water below; now, if some one can keep the boat steady, and you have the nerve to stand at the highest point of the bow, then by reaching over your head you can gently touch some fuzzy bits of life in the nest. Now you know the first and last of the facts recorded are correct: there is the nest on the inaccessible cliff; there are the birds, and if they did not fly up and out into the world the first time they stood on the edge of the nest, would they not be in the dark water below, instead of coming back to the old home for a hundred years? The evidence of successive occupation for a century is this: The present family of Walkers—father and children—have watched that nest, never finding it empty a summer for twenty years. Old Deacon Walker, grandfather of our club members—who, of course, initiated their father—proved that Phoebes had hatched in the cliff nest during eighty years previous, in this wise: After he had stood guard forty years, as the deacon loved to relate, didn’t his Uncle Israel—who had been spending just those two-score years in the South—come home one spring evening, and the very next morning that ancient worthy demanded a boat and a boy to take him under the old Phoebe’s nest on the ledge, which he affirmed had never been without tenants during the forty years before he left Cloverdale? So there are the figures and facts showing how not only the nest, but bird love and bird lore had come down through the century, and with such an inheritance, no wonder the Walkers are on the best of terms with feathered folk, or that they, with their confidential friends, the Clymers, are still adding to their bird book things not generally known. Elizabeth Reed Brownell. THE BLACKBIRD’S SONG. The bee is asleep in the heart of the rose, The lark’s nestled soft in the cloud, The swallow lies snug close under the eaves— But the blackbird’s fluting is loud; He pipes as no hermit would or should, Half a mile deep in the heart of the wood, In the green dark heart of the wood. The raven’s asleep in the thick of the oak, His head close under his wing; The lark’s come down to his home on the earth— But the blackbird still will sing, Making the heart of the dark wood thrill With the notes that come from his golden bill, That flow from his golden bill. —Walter Thornbury. A GOLDEN EAGLE.