It was as fine an illustration of courage as I ever saw, a triumph of love and duty over fear—fear that perhaps we have no way to measure. And it was a triumph of wedded love at that; for there were no young, not even an egg in the unfinished nest. It all happened in less than a minute. The female reappeared in an instant, satisfied that all was well with the nest, and both birds sped off and dropped among the briers.
How would the casuist decide for so sweet, so big, so heroic a deception—or the attempt?
A little farther down the creek, where the meadows meet the marsh, dwell the cousins of the winter wrens, the long-billed marsh-wrens. Here in the wide reaches of calamus and reeds, where the brackish tide comes in, the marsh-wrens build by hundreds. Their big, bulky nests are woven about a handful of young calamus-blades, or tied to a few long, stout sedge-stalks, and grow as the season grows.
"A triumph of love and duty over fear."
The nests are made of coarse marsh-grass,—of the floatage often,—and are so long in the process of construction that, when completed, they are all speared through with the grass-blades, as with so many green bayonets. They are about the size of a large calabash, nearly round, thick-walled and heavy, with a small entrance, just under the roof, leading upward like a short stair to a deep, pocket-like cavity, at whose bottom lie the eggs, barely out of finger reach.