A pompous old cock pheasant came strutting down a ride in the young bracken, the sun shining full on his glossy plumage and black-barred tail. Presently his wife followed him, and behind her came a dozen chicks flitting noiselessly over the ground like so many small brown shadows. A pair of wood-pigeons were raising their second brood in a fir-tree, not far away from where we lived, and every now and then, with a rapid clatter of wings, one of the old birds came flapping through the aisles of the plantation with food for their two ugly, half-fledged young ones. I wonder, by the by, why a wood-pigeon is so amazingly careless about its nest building. I never can understand how it is that the young ones do not fall off the rough platform of sticks which is their apology for a nest. And it must be shockingly cold and draughty, too. Birds are supposed to be ahead of all other nest-builders, but I can tell you there are a good many besides the wood-pigeon who might take a few pointers in architecture from us squirrels, to say nothing of our distant cousin the door-mouse. A sharp rat-a-tat just behind startled me, and there was a big green woodpecker hanging on tight against the trunk of our own larch with his strong claws, and pounding the bark with his hammer-like beak. Father looked at him with interest. ‘Ah,’ he observed, ‘it’s about time we did move. The old tree must be getting rotten, or we shouldn’t have a visit from him.’ It was all most pleasant and peaceful as we sat there—Rusty, Hazel, and I—enjoying the gentle swinging in the soft west wind, and waiting for mother to come home. It was a very fine summer, that one. I have never seen one like it since. We had very little rain and no storms for weeks on end, and the crops of mast and nuts were splendid. But I am running ahead too fast. The very next day after our narrow escape from the two loafers, father set to work to make a new house in the fir-tree he had spoken of. Luckily for him, there was an old carrion crow’s nest handy in the top branches, and he got plenty of sticks out of this for the framework. Mother helped him to gather some moss—nice dry stuff from the roots of a beech, and he made a tidy job of it within three days. Of course, he did not build so elaborately as if he had been constructing a winter nest—we squirrels never do. But all the same, he put a good water-tight roof over it.