I sat a long time watching the work. It went on in perfect silence, not a chirp, not the sound of a fluttering wing. The swamp along whose margin the birds were building had not a joyous atmosphere. Damp, dim-shadowed, and secret, it seemed to have laid its spell upon the birds. Their very gray and black was as if mixed of the dusk, and of the gray, half-light of the swamp; their noiseless coming and going was like the slipping to and fro of shadows. They were a part of it all, and that sharing was their defense, the best defense they knew. It didn’t save their nest, however. They felt and obeyed the spirit of the swamp in their own conduct, but the swamp did not tell them where to build. It was about three weeks later that I stopped again under the pine and found the birch stub in pieces upon the ground. Some robber had been after the eggs and had brought the whole house tumbling down. This is not the fate of all such birch-bark houses. Now and again they escape; but it is always a matter for wonder. I was following an old disused wood road once when I scared a robin from her nest. Her mate joined her, and together they raised a great hubbub. Immediately a chewink, a pair of vireos, and two black and white warblers joined the robins in their din. Then a chickadee appeared. He (I say “he” knowingly; and here he quite redeems himself) had a worm in his beak. His anxiety seemed so real that I began to watch him, when, looking down among the stones for a place to step, what should I see but his mate emerging from the end of a birch stump at my very feet. She had heard the din and had come out to see what it was all about. At sight of her, he hastened with his worm, brushing my face, almost, as he darted to her side. She took it sweetly, for she knew he had intended it for her. But how do I know that? Perhaps he meant it for the young! There were no young in the nest, only eight eggs. Even after the young came (there were eight of them!), and when life, from daylight to dark, was one ceaseless, hurried hunt for worms, I saw him over and over again fly to her side caressingly and tempt her to eat. The house of this pair did not fall. How could it when it stood precisely two and a half feet from the ground! But that it wasn’t looted is due to the sheer audacity of its situation. It stood alone, against the road, so close that the hub of a low wheel in passing might have knocked it down. Perhaps a hundred persons had brushed it in going by. How many dogs and cats had overlooked it no one can say, nor how many skunks and snakes and squirrels. The accident that discovered it to me happened apparently to no one else, and I was friendly.