For it had bene an auncient tree, Sacred with many a mysteree. Indeed, what is there built with hands that has the dignity, the majesty, the divinity of life? And what life was here! Life whose beginnings lay so far back that I could no more reckon the years than I could count the atoms it had builded into this majestic form. Looking down upon the oak from twice its height loomed a tulip poplar, clean-bolled for thirty feet, and in the top all green and gold with blossoms. It was a resplendent thing beside the oak, yet how unmistakably the gnarled old monarch wore the crown. Its girth more than balanced the poplar’s greater height, and as for blossoms, Nature knows the beauty of strength and inward majesty, and has pinned no boutonnière upon the oak. My buzzard now was hardly more than half a mile away, and plainly seen through the rifts in the lofty timbered roof above me. As I was nearing the top of a large fallen pine that lay in my course, I was startled by the _burrh! burrh! burrh!_ of three partridges taking flight just beyond, near the foot of the tree. Their exploding seemed all the more real when three little clouds of dust-smoke rose out of the low, wet bottom and drifted up against the green. Then I saw an interesting sight. In falling, the pine with its wide-reaching, multitudinous roots had snatched at the shallow, sandy bottom and torn out a giant fistful, leaving a hole about two feet deep and more than a dozen feet wide. The sand thus lifted into the air had gradually washed down into a mound on each side of the butt, where it lay high and dry above the level of the swamp. This the swamp birds had turned into a great dust-bath. It was in constant use, surely, for not a spear of grass had sprouted in it, and all over it were pits and craters of various sizes, showing that not only the partridges, but also the quails, and such small things as the warblers, washed here,—though I can’t recall ever having seen a warbler bathe in the dust. A dry bath in the swamp was something of a luxury, evidently. I wonder if the buzzards used it? I went forward cautiously now, and expectantly, for I was close enough to see the white beak and red wattled neck of my guide. It saw me, too, and began to twist its head as I shifted, and to twitch its wing tips nervously. Suddenly its long, black wings opened, and with a heavy lurch that left the stub rocking, it dropped and was soon soaring high up in the blue. This was the right locality; now where should I find the nest? Apparently I was to have no further help from the old bird. The underbrush was so thick that I could see hardly farther than my nose. A half-rotten tree trunk lay near, the top end resting across the backs of several saplings which it had borne down in its fall. I crept up on this for a look around, and almost tumbled off at finding myself staring directly into the dark, cavernous hollow of an immense log lying on a slight rise of ground a few feet ahead of me.