At the foot of the long arbour lay a dying birdling. He had as yet no feathers, but a thin black down covered his bluish skin now painfully heaving with the last spasms of agony. My first motion was to climb in search of the nest from which the victim had fallen. I had not mounted a yard from the ground before I found a little dead body similar to the one I had just seen, and while I peered upward into the shadow, what should tumble on to my head but a third member of the same brood. I finally distinguished the nest, and soon little, stifled cries warned me of something going on in it. I bent to one side, to get a better view, and discovered in the midst of the down-lined dwelling a great grayish black bird surrounded by three wretched wee ones who had not as yet been tossed into the abyss, but who were rendered miserably uncomfortable by the inordinate growth of their big brother. A cuckoo had deposited her egg there, and the parents, stupidly deceived, lavishing the same care upon the intruder as upon their own young, had succeeded only in absurdly favouring the strongest. Meanwhile, he had grown to twice or thrice the size of his "brothers," and without, presumably, seeking any satisfaction but his "liberty," as the economists put it, he was taking up the room of others, for the sole reason that the development of his organs required it. Like all young birds, the baby cuckoo automatically flapped his wings, to exercise his joints. In a normal nest, this movement of each inmate is limited and regulated by the same movement on the part of the others. But here, too great strength was in conflict with too great weakness, and the cuckoo's thick, stumpy wings, on which feathers were already appearing, spread to the very edge of the nest, lifting the feeble little ones on to the monster's back, whence a shake flung them overboard. The crime occurred even while I watched. The worst of it was seeing the stupid parents, in spite of all, diligently feeding the infamous fratricide. Careless of the lamentations of their own children, they could see in the nest only the huge hollow of a voracious beak, which gobbled whatever they brought, notwithstanding the timid efforts of the competitors, doomed beforehand to defeat. And so the disproportion in growth augmented daily, the one taking everything, and the others condemned to watch him helplessly. The social question is repeated in every thicket on earth!