This same gentleman determined to spend a whole day in discovering how the thrushes spent it. Hiding himself, therefore, in a little hut of fir boughs, he began his observations in the early morning of the 8th of June. At half-past two o’clock, the birds began to feed their brood, and in two hours had fed them thirty-six times. It was now half-past five, the little birds were all wide awake, and one of them, whilst pruning its feathers, lost its balance and fell out of the nest to the ground. On this the old ones set up the most doleful lamentations, and the gentleman, coming out of his retreat, put the little one back into the nest. This kind action, however, wholly disconcerted the parents, nor did they again venture to feed their young till an artifice of the gentleman led them to suppose that he was gone from their neighbourhood. No other event happened to them through the day, and by half-past nine o’clock at night, when all went to rest, the young ones had been fed two hundred and six times. Thrushes, however, become occasionally so extremely tame that the female will remain upon her eggs and feed her young, without any symptom of alarm, in the close neighbourhood of man. Of this I will give an instance from Bishop Stanley’s “History of Birds”— “A short time ago, in Scotland, some carpenters working in a shed adjacent to the house observed a thrush flying in and out, which induced them to direct their attention to the cause, when, to their surprise, they found a nest commenced amongst the teeth of a harrow, which, with other farming tools and implements, was placed upon the joists of the shed, just over their heads. The carpenters had arrived soon after six o’clock, and at seven, when they found the nest, it was in a great state of forwardness, and had evidently been the morning’s work of a pair of these indefatigable birds. Their activity throughout the day was incessant; and, when the workmen came the next morning, they found the female seated in her half-finished mansion, and, when she flew off for a short time, it was found that she had laid an egg. When all was finished, the he-bird took his share of the labour, and, in thirteen days, the young birds were out of their shells, the refuse of which the old ones carried away from the spot. All this seems to have been carefully observed by the workmen; and it is much to their credit that they were so quiet and friendly as to win the confidence of the birds.” The song of the thrush is remarkable for its rich, mellow intonation, and for the great variety of its notes. [Sidenote: _Wordsworth’s Verses on the Thrush._]