The small type of the lives of bird and beast about her is easily read by this cheerful invalid. "To understand that the sky is everywhere blue," says Goethe, "we need not go around the world;" and it would seem that this woman has got all the good and pleasure there is in natural history from the pets in her room, and the birds that build before her window. I had been for a long time trying to determine whether or not the blue jay hoarded up nuts for winter use, but had not been able to settle the point. I applied to her, and, sitting by her window, she discovered that jays do indeed hoard food in a tentative, childish kind of way, but not with the cunning and provident foresight of the squirrels and native mice. She saw a jay fly to the ground with what proved to be a peanut in its beak, and carefully cover it up with leaves and grass. "The next fall, looking out of my own window, I saw two jays hiding chestnuts with the same blind instinct. They brought them from a near tree, and covered them up in the grass, putting but one in a place. Subsequently, in another locality, I saw jays similarly employed. It appears to be simply the crow instinct to steal, or to carry away and hide any superfluous morsel of food." The jays were really planting chestnuts instead of hoarding them. There was no possibility of such supplies being available in winter, and in spring a young tree might spring from each nut. This fact doubtless furnishes a key to the problem why a forest of pine is usually succeeded by a forest of oak. The acorns are planted by the jays. Their instinct for hiding things prompts them to seek the more dark and secluded pine woods with their booty, and the thick layer of needles furnishes an admirable material with which to cover the nut. The germ sprouts and remains a low slender shoot for years, or until the pine woods are cut away, when it rapidly becomes a tree.