twigs a bit here and there, and then, as she rose to depart, she looked me suddenly in the face and stopped, as much as to say, “Well, well! here’s a pretty go!  A man spying upon me!” I wondered whether she would throw up the work, but in another minute she was back again with another twig.  The nest, I should have said, was about four feet from the ground, and perhaps twenty feet from the cottage.  Four days later, I found her sitting upon it.  She flew off as I came up, and I pushed into the scrub far enough to thrust my hand into the nest, which, to my disappointment, was empty.  In fact, it was still far from completed; for on the 3d of March, when I paid it a farewell visit, its owner was still at work lining it with fine grass.  At that time it was a comfortable-looking and really elaborate structure.  Both the birds came to look at me as I stood on the piazza.  They perched together on the top of a stake so narrow that there was scarcely room for their feet; and as they stood thus, side by side, one of them struck its beak several times against the beak of the other, as if in play.  I wished them joy of their expected progeny, and was the more ready to believe they would have it for this little display of sportive sentimentality.

It was a distinguished company that frequented that row of narrow back yards on the edge of the sand-hills.  As a new-comer, I found the jays (sometimes there were ten under my eye at once) the most entertaining members of it, but if I had been a dweller there for the summer, I should perhaps have altered my opinion; for the group contained four of the finest of Floridian songsters,—­the mocking-bird, the brown thrasher, the cardinal grosbeak, and the Carolina wren.  Rare morning and evening concerts those cottagers must have.  And besides these there were catbirds, ground doves, red-eyed chewinks, white-eyed chewinks, a song sparrow (one of the few that I saw in Florida), savanna sparrows, myrtle birds, redpoll warblers, a phoebe, and two flickers.  The last-named birds, by the way, are never backward about displaying their tender feelings.  A treetop flirtation is their special delight (I hope my readers have all seen one; few things of the sort are better worth looking at), and here, in the absence of trees, they had taken to the ridgepole of a house.

More than once I remarked white-breasted swallows straggling northward along the line of sand-hills.  They were in loose order, but the movement was plainly concerted, with all the look of a vernal migration.  This swallow, the first of its family to arrive in New England, remains in Florida throughout the winter, but is known also to go as far south as Central America.  The purple martins—­which, so far as I am aware, do not winter in Florida—­had already begun to make their appearance.  While crossing the bridge, February 22, I was surprised to notice two of them sitting upon a bird-box over the draw, which just then stood open for the passage of a tug-boat.  The toll-gatherer told me they had come “from some place” eight or ten days before.  His attention had been called to them by his cat, who was trying to get up to the box to bid them welcome.  He believed that she discovered them within three minutes of their arrival.  It seemed not unlikely.  In its own way a cat is a pretty sharp ornithologist.