There is, too, a certain little dapper, demurely self-satisfied look about the bird—I mean in the illustrations, for I have never seen it—as if it knew what it could do, and was proud of being able to do it. If it is, nobody, I think, need blame it. Besides birds that weave or stitch their nests, thus associating themselves, as it were, with two of the oldest and most respectable guilds of human society—there are others that belong to a third guild, and may be called potters, inasmuch as they make theirs of clay, with only a small admixture of other substances. The Oven-bird is, perhaps, the chief of these, a bird allied to our own little tree-creeper, but about the size of a lark. It lives about the banks of South American rivers, and with the mud, or clay, that it finds there, stiffened with grass, bits of straw, or other vegetable fibres, it builds its very remarkable nest, which, “in shape, precisely resembles an oven or depressed beehive,” and is soon baked almost as hard as a brick, by the heat of the tropical sun. The outer clay wall of this strange nest is nearly an inch in thickness, and, as there are two interior chambers, the size of the whole is very considerable, in proportion to that of the bird. It is, therefore, a conspicuous object in itself, and not the slightest attempt is made by the bird to conceal it. “It is placed,” says Darwin, “in the most exposed situations, as on the top of a post, a bare rock, or on a cactus.” The entrance is at one side, and in the larger of the two compartments, which is the inner one, the nest, which is a soft bed of feathers, is placed. What the outer compartment is used for, or whether it has any special use, I do not know. Wood says that the male probably sits in it, whilst Darwin thinks it merely forms a passage, or antechamber, to the true nest. As to a very learned work written by several learned people, which I am always looking at, and always to little or no purpose, it says nothing, but merely tells you that so and so has mentioned the bird and somebody else said quite a good deal about it—and it evidently thinks this enough, though I don’t.