It is at nesting-time that we take especial care of the garden table. We furnish everything we imagine acceptable. As soon as the young of finches or sparrows are out of the nest they are brought to the table by their parents. All the birds have a sweet tooth. They like cookies and pie and sugar and (as will be remembered in the case of the sparrows) good molasses. It was when the tourist robins were here that we thought about the molasses. The robins wouldn't take it _clear_, as the sparrows did, so we mixed it with meal. They came and looked at it and tasted, and liked it very well. Thinking to score a point for the temperance people, we mixed some old bourbon with the pudding. A tipsy robin would be a funny sight! But not a morsel of the meal would they ever touch. We kept up the game several days, it resulting at last in all the robins leaving the grounds in disgust. Then we tried it on the sparrows, but to no purpose. Every bird grew suspicious, and we had to give it up. This proved to us that birds cultivate the sense of smell. Birds in general are like the donkey before whose nose is suspended a wisp of hay tied to the end of a pole, "to make him go." Of course in the case of the donkey the pole goes in advance of the nose, and it's a long while before the wisp and the appetite have a passing acquaintance. With the birds at our home the "wisp" is always out, so they are in no hurry to migrate. They do not leave us for so much as a short visit to their folks in Mexico until the molt is well under way. Some summer visitants even molt completely with us, and it is a sorry season. By the time a young bird is able to hustle for himself he wouldn't know his own mother. She has shed the feathers around the beak, leaving her nose or mouth so grotesque one has to laugh. Seeming to understand the joke is at their expense; some of our birds at this time keep well hidden, and come only to the edges of the shrubbery for food, or if overtaken in the open, they run as fast as their legs can carry them. A song-sparrow without a bit of tail is hopping now under the window, chirping her happy note, but hiding if we look at her. A hummer, which yesterday took honey from the flowers we held in our lips, sits on a tiny twig, the picture of despair because her neck feathers are so thin. A mocker who has drank all summer from the dish with the bees, peeps at her shadow and preens imaginary quills. Half of them are on the ground by the table.