During the last summer, day after day I saw one of the birds going by my door toward the clump of thorn-trees with a big green worm in its bill. One afternoon I followed it. I found the bird sitting on a branch very still and straight, with the worm still in its beak. I sat down on the tentlike thicket and watched him. Presently he uttered that harsh, guttural note of alarm or displeasure. Then after a minute or two he began to shake and bruise the worm. I waited to see him disclose the nest, but he would not, and finally devoured the worm. Then he hopped or flitted about amid the branches above me, uttering his harsh note every minute or two. After a half-hour or more I gave it up and parted the curtain of thorny branches which separated the thicket from the meadow and stepped outside. I had moved along only a few paces when I discovered the nest on an outer branch almost in the sunshine. The mother bird was covering her half-grown young. As I put up my hand toward her, she slipped off, withdrew a few feet into the branches, and uttered her guttural calls. In the nest were four young, one of them nearly ready to leave it, while another barely had its eyes open; the eldest one looked frightened, while the youngest lifted up its head with open mouth for food. The most mature one pointed its bill straight up and sat as still as if petrified. The whole impression one got from the nest and its contents was of something inept and fortuitous. But the cares of a family woke the parents up and they got down to real work in caring for their charge. The young had a curious, unbirdlike aspect with threadlike yellow stripes, and looked as if they were wet or just out of the shell. That strain of parasitism in the blood of the cuckoo--how long in the history of its race since it mastered it and became its own nest-builder? But a crude and barbarous nest-builder it certainly is. Its "procreant cradle" is built entirely of the twigs of the thorn-tree, with all their sharp needle-like spines upon them, some of the twigs a foot long, bristling with spines, certainly the most forbidding-looking nest and nursery I ever beheld--a mere platform of twigs about four inches across, carpeted with a little shredded brown fibrous material, looking as if made from the inner bark of some tree, perhaps this very thorn. In the total absence of the tent caterpillar or apple-tree worm, which is their favorite food, cuckoos seem to succeed in finding a large green worm here in the orchard. In the beech woods they can find a forest worm that is riddling the leaves of the beeches. The robins are there in force and I hope the cuckoos will join them in the destruction of the worms. It is interesting to see the cuckoo fly by several times a day with a big green worm in its beak. Inefficient as it seems, here it is doing things. It is like seeing a monk at the plough-handle. It is a solemn creature; its note is almost funereal.