Both birds were working when I discovered them, and so busily that my coming up did not delay them for a single billful. It was not hard digging, but it was very slow, for chickadee is neither carpenter nor mason. He has difficulty in killing a hard-backed beetle. So, whenever you find him occupying a clean-walled cavity, with a neat, freshly clipped doorway, you may be sure that some woodpecker built the house, not this short-billed, soft-tailed little tit. He lacks both the bill-chisel and the tail-brace. Perhaps the explanation of his fondness for birch trees lies here: they die young and soon decay. The birds were going down through the top, not by a hole in the leathery rind of the sides, for the bark would have been too tough for their beaks. They would drop into the top of the stub, pick up a wad of decayed wood, and fly off to the dead limb of the pine. Here, with a jerk and a snap of their bills, they would scatter the stuff in a shower so thin and far around that I could neither hear it fall nor find a trace of it upon the dead leaves of the ground. This nest would never be betrayed by the workmen’s chips. Between the pair there averaged three beakfuls of excavating every two minutes, one of the birds regularly shoveling twice to the other’s once. They looked so exactly alike that I could not tell which bird was pushing the enterprise; but I have my suspicions. There is nothing so superior about his voice or appearance that he should thus shirk. He was doing part of his duty, apparently, but it was half-hearted work. Hers was the real interest, the real anxiety; and hers the initiative. To be a male and show off! That’s the thing. To be a male and let your wife carry the baby! The final distinctive difference between a truly humanized, civilized man and all other males of every order, is a willingness to push the baby carriage. The finer the feathers or the song among male birds the less use they are in practical, domestic ways. Fine beaux, captivating lovers, they become little else than a nuisance as husbands. One of my friends has been watching a pair of bluebirds building. The male sat around for a week without bringing in a feather. Then one day he was seen to enter the hole, after his busy mate had just left it, and carry out a beakful of grass which he scattered to the winds in pure perversity, criticising her bungling work, maybe! More likely he was jealous. Chickadee was no such precious fool as that. He was doing something; trying to drown his regret for the departing honeymoon in hard labor, not, however, to the danger of his health.