one which has been dead just long enough to have become soft and brittle throughout.  The bird goes in horizontally for a few inches, making a hole perfectly round and smooth and adapted to his size; then turns downward, gradually enlarging the hole, as he proceeds, to the depth of ten, fifteen, twenty inches, according to the softness of the tree and the urgency of the mother bird to deposit her eggs.  While excavating, male and female work alternately.  After one has been engaged fifteen or twenty minutes, drilling, and carrying out chips, it ascends to an upper limb, utters a loud call or two, when its mate soon appears, and, alighting near it on the branch, the pair chatter and caress a moment; then the fresh one enters the cavity and the other flies away.

A few days since, I climbed up to the nest of the downy woodpecker, in the decayed top of a sugar-maple.  For better protection against driving rains, the hole which was rather more than an inch in diameter, was made immediately beneath a branch which stretched out almost horizontally from the main stem.  It appeared merely a deeper shadow upon the dark and mottled surface of the bark with which the branches were covered, and could not be detected by the eye until one was within a few feet of it.  The young chirped vociferously as I approached the nest, thinking it was the old one with food; but the clamor suddenly ceased as I put my hand on that part of the trunk in which they were concealed, the unusual jarring and rustling alarming them into silence.  The cavity, which was about fifteen inches deep, was gourd-shaped, and was wrought with great skill and regularity.  The walls were quite smooth and clean and new.

[Illustration:  WOODPECKER’S NEST. (Dotted lines indicate inside of nest and eggs).]

I shall never forget the circumstance of observing a pair of yellow-bellied woodpeckers,—­the most rare and secluded, and, next to the red-headed, the most beautiful species found in our woods,—­breeding in an old, truncated beech in the Beaverkill Mountains, an off-shoot of the Catskills.  We had been travelling, three of us, all day in search of a trout lake, which lay far in among the mountains, had twice lost our course in the trackless forest, and, weary and hungry, had sat down to rest upon a decayed log.  The chattering of the young, and the passing to and fro of the parent birds, soon arrested my attention.  The entrance to the nest was on the east side of the tree, about twenty-five feet from the ground.  At intervals of scarcely a minute, the old birds, one after another, would light upon the edge of the hole with a grub or worm in their beaks; then each in turn would make a bow or two, cast an eye quickly around, and by a single movement place itself in the neck of the passage.  Here it would pause a moment, as if to determine in which expectant mouth to place the morsel, and then disappear within.  In about half a minute, during which time the chattering of