to be fed each time, every bird must receive in this period eight-and- twenty portions of food or water! This excessive labor seems entailed upon most of the land birds, except the gallinaceous tribes, and some of the marine birds, which toil with infinite perseverance in fishing for their broods; but the very precarious supply of food to be obtained in dry seasons by the terrestrial birds renders theirs a labor of more unremitting hardship than that experienced by the piscivorous tribes, the food of which is probably little influenced by season, while our poor land birds find theirs to be nearly annihilated in some cases. The gallinaceous birds have nests on the ground; the young leave them as soon as they escape from the shell, are led immediately from the hatch to fitting situations for food and water, and all their wants are most admirably attended to; but the constant journeyings of those parent birds that have nestlings unable to move away, the speed with which they accomplish their trips, the anxiety they manifest, and the long labor in which they so gaily persevere, is most remarkable and pleasing, and a duty consigned but to a few. We have no bird more assiduous in attentions to their young, than the red-start, (_steort_, Saxon, a tail,) one or other of the parents being in perpetual action, conveying food to the nest, or retiring in search of it; but as they are active, quick-sighted creatures, they seem to have constant success in their transits. They are the most restless and suspicious of birds during this season of hatching and rearing their young; for when the female is sitting, her mate attentively watches over her safety, giving immediate notice of the approach of any seemingly hostile thing, by a constant repetition of one or two querulous notes, monitory to her or menacing to the intruder: but when the young are hatched, the very appearance of any suspicious creature sets the parents into an agony of agitation, and perching upon some dead branch or a post, they persevere in one unceasing clamor till the object of their fears is removed; a magpie near their haunts, with some reason, excites their terror greatly, which is expressed with unremitting vociferation. All this parental anxiety, however, is no longer in operation than during the helpless state of their offspring, which, being enabled to provide their own requirements, gradually cease to be the objects of solicitude and care; they retire to some distant hedge, become shy and timid things, feeding in unobtrusive silence.