This nest is extremely soft and elastic, sometimes of large size, the reason for which one cannot understand. It is generally near to the water, and, being kept damp by its situation, is always so fresh, looking so like the mass of its immediate surroundings as scarcely to be discoverable by the quickest eye. When the young are hatched they soon go abroad with the parents, and then, instead of the one solitary bird, you may see them in little parties of from five to seven going on in the same sort of way, only all the merrier because there are more of them. [Illustration] CHAPTER VI. THE NIGHTINGALE. Philomela, or the Nightingale, is the head of the somewhat large bird-family of Warblers, and is the most renowned of all feathered songsters, though some judges think the garden-ousel exceeds it in mellowness, and the thrush in compass of voice, but that, in every other respect, it excels them all. For my part, however, I think no singing-bird is equal to it; and listening to it when in full song, in the stillness of a summer’s night, am ready to say with good old Izaak Walton:— “The nightingale, another of my airy creatures, breathes such sweet music out of her little instrumental throat, that it might make mankind to think that miracles had not ceased. He that at midnight, when the weary labourer sleeps securely, should hear, as I have very often heard, the clear airs, the sweet descants, the natural rising and falling, the doubling and redoubling of her voice, might well be lifted above earth and say, ‘Lord, what music hast Thou provided for the saints in heaven, when Thou affordest bad men such music on earth!’”