So great is the affection and solicitude of the red-eyed vireo for her young, that she will scarcely leave the nest when the hand is stretched out a few inches over the mouth of the structure. And then when she does leave, it is not in a hurried, precipitate manner, but with a quiet, deliberate movement that excites one’s admiration and makes one vow never to abuse such simple, childlike confidence. I have even placed my hand upon the sitting-bird without disturbing the current of her brooding thoughts, or the peaceful serenity of her soul. A rough dash at the nest tends to frighten her away _instanter_, but when the hand is reached out to it slowly and silently the bird seems to act as though it had nothing to fear, and remains calm and self-possessed. Who is not familiar with the proverbial skill of the Carolina dove in feigning lameness when her nest is being approached? Without a cry, and with scarcely a rustle of her feathers, she slips out of her nest upon the ground, and by a series of manœuvres, as if desperately wounded, grovels along on her belly in the dust till she has led her enemy a long journey from the site of the nest, when she will take to wing and fly away into a coppice or a clump of brushwood. That birds should manifest a love for the young which they hatch has always seemed a strange problem to me. I can see how that, in the case of a mammal, the mother should feel a love for the creature who is absolutely a part of herself--whose very life-blood is drawn from her veins. But this is not necessarily the case with birds. If, as often happens with poultry, the eggs of several hens are placed under one bird for hatching, the hen that hatches them knows no difference between the chickens that come from her own eggs and those which proceed from eggs laid by others. Even where the eggs belong to birds of different species, as to the common Muscovy-duck for example, the hen displays as much affection for the young ducklings, despite the disparity of instinct and habit, as she does had they proceeded from her own eggs. May it not be that parental love has different channels of transmission, and that in such a case as this the emanation from the sitting-hen may be the vehicle of parental love toward the young which are to be hatched? Certain it is that a sitting-hen, as many of us have observed, is altogether a changed being, both in attitude and expression. She is entirely absorbed in the eggs when she is incubating, and, though she may not have the intellect to distinguish a mere lump of chalk from one of her own eggs, yet love is altogether independent of intellect, and may exist in all its vigor, and yet may be wasted on an unworthy object.