After that came the tragedy of the day for me. An overhanging bough
knocked off my glasses, and they sank in the black waters of the marsh
and continued sunk, in spite of my frantic groping and diving for
them. The rest of the day I realized how the blinded galley-slaves
felt who were chained to the oar in mediæval times. The Banker kindly
described to me all the sixty-five different kinds of birds he saw in
that marsh. As my vision was limited to a range of about two feet, I
did not see many more birds personally. In spite of my blinded
condition, I did discover, however, another prothonotary's nest. I had
taken hold of a rotten willow-stub while pushing the boat through a
thicket. It broke in my hand, and there, in an exposed downy
woodpecker's hole, was a newly made nest of green moss, with a few
twigs and bark-strips on top, but no eggs. The fourth and last nest
was found by the Banker, again in a downy's hole. He saw something
move and thought it was a mouse or chickadee. Finally a long bill came
out of the hole and then a head. It was a hen prothonotary building
her nest. She had the hole already filled with moss, and was bringing
in grass, and would whirl around and around inside, modeling the nest
carefully. Within, she had lined it with grass, just as a chipping
sparrow's nest is lined with hair.
This was the last nest of the day. The Banker suggested that we stay
over another night, but I felt that home was the best place for a
blind man. My last memory of the golden prothonotary was hearing him
call, "Tweet, tweet, tweet" from the willows, as we started back to
the mill.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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