I thought that was the end, but I was mistaken. Soon he shot up to the limb, this time with a dead leaf in his beak. I watched intently and saw him carefully lay the leaf over the hole where he had hidden the suet. A gust of wind, however, blew the leaf off the limb, and sent it swirling to the ground. Quick as a hawk the jay swooped after it in an ineffectual attempt to capture it while it was still in the air. They reached the ground together. Convinced apparently that the leaf was too large, he selected another, much smaller, and carried it up to the limb. This time he did not merely lay the leaf over the hole; he had learned his lesson. Instead, he rammed the leaf into the hole on top of the suet, a really difficult job, and packed it firmly with his beak. It was safe from the other jays if not from the inquisitive redheaded woodpecker who lived only a few branches away. Now all you host of cocksure psychologists, was it instinct or reason that led the jay? I know it has been argued that since a jay will attack a stuffed owl placed near his nest, he must be without the power of reason. The test seems hardly fair, for the ghoulish mystery of the taxidermist is known to no animal but man. Thus at the very start the jay is laid under an unreasonable handicap. Consider, too, the ingeniously cruel nature of this test; it pierces him as it were in the eye of his most sensitive instinct. Even human parents, faced by an ordeal at all comparable to this in sudden poignancy, would scarcely act in a manner calmly rational. What mother, leaving her infant slumbering in the cradle, and suddenly returning to find a brutal visaged mannikin bent over it in a posture of menace, would expend the millionth of a second in the psychologist's reflective delay? Like the jay, she would act in such a situation from instinct alone, nor would we consider her deficient in intelligence. But even if the jay were as stupid as an old-model political prison-warden, or an English official in Ireland, which he indubitably is not, I would still look upon him with an indulgent eye. The redbird excepted, he is the sole bit of lively color in our winter landscape. No matter how sharp the wind or deep the snow, you will find him foraging among the low bushes or uttering his cheerfully vigorous _jay! jay! jay!_ from the airy chambers of some tall, bare maple. And if you are of that generous company who share their winter bounty with the birds, from none of your feathered charity scholars will you receive more evident tokens of full appreciation than from the maligned jay. He is as prompt to the feeding board as an impecunious college professor to the bursar's office at the end of the first quarter. To be sure, his table manners are somewhat rude, but what he lacks in elegance he more than atones for with a certain robust beef-and-pudding gusto that I have somehow come to associate with Lord Macaulay.