Personally I collect only notes, out-of-door secrets, and little everyday adventures. Bird-songs, flower-fields, and friendships with the wild-folk mean far more to me than cabinets of pierced eggs, dried flowers, stuffed birds, and tanned skins. Nor am I much of a hunter. When it comes to slaughtering defenseless animals with high-powered guns, I prefer a position in an abattoir. One can kill more animals in a day, and with less exertion. Yet my collecting and sporting friends make allowances for my vagaries and take me with them on their journeyings. Wherefore it happened that in early March I received a telegram. "Raven's nest located. Come if you are man enough." Now a middle-aged lawyer and the father of a family has no business ravening along the icy and inaccessible cliffs which that gifted fowl prefers for nursery purposes. I have, however, a maxim of Thoreau which I furbish up for just such occasions. "A man sits as many risks as he runs," wrote that wanderer in the woods. Accordingly the next morning found me two hundred miles to the north, plodding through a driving snow-storm toward Seven Mountains, with the first man in recent years to find the nest of a northern raven in Pennsylvania. For fifteen freezing miles we clambered over and around three of the seven. By the middle of the afternoon we reached a cliff hidden behind thickets of rhododendron. In the meantime the snow had changed to a lashing rain, probably the coldest that has ever fallen on the North American continent. Ploughing through slush, the black rhododendron stems twisted around us like wet rubber, and the hollow green leaves funneled ice-water down our backs and into our ears. Breaking through the last of the thickets, we at length reached a little brook which ran along the foot of the cliff. A hundred feet above, out from the middle of the cliff stretched a long tongue of rock. Over this the cliff arched like a roof, with a space between which widened toward the tip of the tongue. In a niche above this cleft a dark mass showed dimly through the rain. "The nest!" muttered the Collector hoarsely, pouring a pint or so of rain-water down my neck from his hat-brim as he bent toward me. I stared with all my eyes, at last one of the chosen few to see the nest of a Pennsylvania raven. It was made of large sticks. The fresh broken ends and the droppings on the cliff-side showed that it was a recent one. There were no signs of either of the birds. We solemnly removed our coats and sweaters and prepared for the worst. To me the cliff looked much like the Matterhorn, only slipperier. The Collector, however, was most reassuring. He told me that the going looked worse than it really was, and that, anyway, if I did fall, death would be so nearly instantaneous as to involve little if any suffering.