attempted murder, and incarcerated in the county jail. But what would be wilful homicide in the man is only a guileless proof of friendship in the boy, and his affections and their symptoms present a living paradox; and those boisterous days, with all their fond caresses in the way of fights and bruises and black eyes, and even Indian turnips, we all agree were full of fun the like of which we never shall see again. [Illustration: MEADOW BROOK.] How well we remember those tramps along the meadow brook: the dark, still holes beneath the overhanging rocks, where, with golden slipping loop and pole and cautious creep, we wired those lazy, unsuspecting “suckers” on the gravelly bed below! Ah! what scientific angling with the rod and reel in later years has ever brought back the keen tingle of that primitive sport? The great green bull-frogs, too, in the lily-pond, disclosing their cavernous resources as they jumped and splashed and sprawled after the tantalizing bit of red flannel on that dangling hook! We recall that rickety bridge among the willows, and the mossy nest of mud so firmly fixed upon the beam beneath. How could we be so deaf to the pleading of those little phoebe-birds that fluttered so beseechingly about us? Then there was that deep hole in the sand-bank near the brook, where the burrowing kingfisher hid away his nest, where we watched in the twilight to see him enter, and, with big round stone in readiness, “plugged” him in his den! What fun it was to dig him out, and ventilate his musty nest of fish-bones! The starling in the thicket of the swamp circled through the air with angry “Quit! quit!” as we picked our way through the bristling bogs so close upon her nest. We’ll not forget that false step that sent us sprawling in the green slimy mud, at the first electrifying glimpse of those brown spotted eggs. The high-holer, too, whose golden gleam of wing upon the bare dead tree betrayed his nesting-place in the hollow limb--was ever such a stimulus offered to the eagerness of youth? Who would give a second thought to his tender shins at the prospect of such a prize as a nest of high-hole’s eggs? How round and white they were! how the pale golden yolk floated beneath the pearly shell! Those were jolly days for us; but the poor birds had to suffer, and few, indeed, were the nests that escaped our prying search. There was the cat-bird in the evergreens, with lovely eggs of peacock blue; the pure white treasures of the swallows in the mud nests under the barn-yard eaves; the sky-blue beauties of the robin; the brown speckled eggs in the sheltered nest of song-sparrows on the grassy slope; the dear little eggs of chippies in their horse-hair bed, and in their midst the insinuated specimen of the cheeky cow-blackbird: there were eggs of every shape and hue, and we knew too well where to put our hand on them. [Illustration: THE PHŒBE’S NEST.] [Illustration: BUILDING THE NEST.]