house-cleaning, preparatory to the one great event of the coming summer—nest-building. While not quite true that all worth knowing of a bird is centered in the few weeks occupied in rearing its young, certainly at no other time is it seen to the same advantage. Every faculty is quickened then, and all that a bird is capable of effecting is apparent. Something more important than food-getting commands its attention, and reason is exercised almost if not quite to the exclusion of instinct, for the nest of every bird must meet its builder’s peculiar needs, and is not fashioned blindly after the homes of its ancestors. It is true that a family likeness runs through the nests of a given species of bird, but to say of a deserted one in autumn this or that bird built it is a rash procedure. Not every bird builds a nest, although all lay eggs, and, as has been intimated, all nests are not alike. Perhaps the cup-shaped structure built of twigs and lined with fine grass may be said to be the typical form, but many are the modifications of this simple pattern. And now this beautiful May morning the birds are building. Not here and there a sparrow or a thrush, but birds of many kinds, and building everywhere. I can not even mention them by name, or my article would run into a catalogue. Suffice it to say they are building in the barn and on it, in my house and down in the chimney; under the floor of the bridge in the lane is a nest, and the trees, shrubbery, and bare ground are all occupied. There is now a nest for every nook and corner, and I would that the young people of everywhere were my guests to-day, provided they would live up to the law I long ago passed for my own government—eyes on; hands off. And now what of the building of particular nests? I know of twenty within a stone’s-throw of my front door, and the making of each one had its serious as well as comic side. At the very outset a conflict of interests arose on account of some bits of material being equally valuable in the minds of several birds; and when an oriole, a wren, and an English sparrow wish to pull at the frayed end of a rope at the same time, something more than a mere ripple of excitement is likely to ensue. In short, nest-building brings out in a bird not only all its belligerency, which during the rest of the year is dormant, but a great deal of strategic skill as well, for many a time I have seen the smaller bird succeed through cunning in outwitting the bully that depended on mere strength of beak and claws.