architects than others. The robins generally build firmly, and their nests often remain through the winter. The red-eyed vireo, or greenlet, or fly-catcher, as you please, is one of our most skillful builders; his nest is pendulous, and generally placed in a small tree—a dog-wood, where he can find one; he uses some odd materials: withered leaves, bits of hornets' nests, flax, scraps of paper, and fibres of grape-vine bark; he lines it with caterpillars' webs, hair, fine grasses, and fibres of bark. These nests are so durable, that a yellow-bird has been known to place her own over an old one of a previous year, made by this bird; and field-mice, probably the jumping-mice, are said frequently to take possession of them after the vireo and its brood are gone. But the red-eyed greenlet is rather a wood-bird, and we must not look for his nest in the village. His brother, the white-eyed greenlet, frequently builds in towns, even in the ornamental trees of our largest cities, in the fine sycamores of the older streets of Philadelphia, for instance.
The nests about our village door-yards and streets are chiefly those of the robin, goldfinch, yellow-bird, song-sparrow, chipping-bird, oriole, blue-bird, wren, Phoebe-bird, and cat-bird, with now and then a few greenlets; probably some snow-birds also, about the garden hedges or fences. This last summer it looked very much as though we had also purple-finches in the village; no nest was found, but the birds were repeatedly seen on the garden fences, near the same spot, at a time when they must have had young. Humming-birds doubtless build in the village, but their nests are rarely discovered; and they are always so small, and such cunning imitations of tufts of lichens and mosses, that they are
