But as he stood and looked, a wistful light came into the eyes of the man. It had been many years since he had found nesting birds and watched the ways of them. His memory brought old pictures back to him. The crotch in the tree, where the robin had plastered her nest, modeling the mud with her feathered breast; the brook-edge willows, where the blackbirds built; the meadow, with its hidden homes of bobolinks; and the woods where the whip-poor-wills called o' nights. His thoughts made a boy of him again, and he forgot everything else in the world in his wish to see the little birds he felt sure must be among the pebbles before him. So he crept about carefully, here and there, and at last came upon the children of Mis. He picked up the fluffy little balls of down and snuggled them gently in his big hands for a moment. Then he put them back to their safe roof, and, gathering up his tools, went on his way, whistling a merry tune remembered from the days when he trudged down Long-ago Lane to the pasture, for his father's cows. Late of afternoon it used to be, while the nighthawks dashed overhead in their air-hunts, showing the white spots in their wings that looked like holes, and sometimes making him jump as they dropped and turned, with a sudden "boom."
No sooner had the sound of his whistle gone from the roof, than Mother Nomer came back to her houseless home—any spot doing as well as another, now that the twins were hatched and able to walk about. As she called her babies to her and tucked them under her feathers, her heart still beating quickly with the excitement of her scare, it would be easy to guess from the dear way of her cuddling that it isn't a beautiful woven cradle or quaint walls of clay that matter most in the life of young birds, but the loving care that is given them. In this respect the young orioles, swinging in their hammock among the swaying tips of the elm tree, and the children of Eve and Petro, in their wonderful brick mansion, were no better off than the twins of Mis and Mother Nomer.
Busy indeed was Mis in the twilights that followed the hatching of his children; and, though he was as much in the air as ever, it was not the fun of frolic and clownish tricks that kept him there. For, besides his own keen appetite, he had now the hunger of the twins to spur him on. Such a hunter as he was in those days! Why, he caught a thousand mosquitos on one trip; and meeting a swarm of flying ants, thought nothing at all of gobbling up five hundred before he stopped. Countless flies went down his throat. And when the big, brown bumping beetles, with hard, shiny wing-covers on their backs and soft, fuzzy velvet underneath, flew out at dusk, twenty or thirty of them, as likely as not, would make a luncheon for Mis the clown. For he was lean and hungry, and he ate and ate and ate; but he never grew fat. He hunted zigzag through the twilight of the evening and the twilight of the dawn. When the nights were bright and game was plenty, he hunted zigzag through the moonlight. When the day was dull and insects were on the wing, he hunted, though it was high noon. And many a midnight rambler going home from the theatre looked up, wondering what made the darting shadows, and saw Mis and his fellows dashing busily above where the night-insects were hovering about the electric lights of the city streets. He hunted long and he hunted well; but so keen was his appetite and so huge the hunger of his twins, that it took the mother, too, to keep the meals provided in the Nomer home.
I think they were never unhappy about it, for there is a certain satisfaction in doing well what we can do; and there is no doubt that these birds were made to be hunters. Mis and his kind swept the air, of course, because they and their young were hungry; but the game they caught, had it gone free to lay its myriad eggs, would have cost many a farmer a fortune in sprays to save his crops, and would have added untold discomfort to dwellers in country and city alike.
Although Mis, under his feathers, was much smaller than one would think to look at him, there were several large things about him besides his appetite. His mouth was almost huge, and reached way around to the sides of his head under his eyes. It opened up more like the mouth of a frog or a toad than like that of most birds. When he hunted he kept it yawning wide open, so that it made a trap for many an unlucky insect that flew straight in, without ever knowing what happened to it when it disappeared down the great hollow throat, into a stomach so enormous that it hardly seems possible that a bird less than twice the size of Mis could own it.
There were other odd things about him, too—for instance, the comb he wore on his middle toe-nail. What he did with it, I can't say. He didn't seem to do very much with his feet anyway. They were rather feeble little things, and he never used them in carrying home anything he caught. He didn't even use them as most birds do when they stop to rest; for, instead of sitting on a twig when he was not flying, he would settle as if lying down. Sometimes he stayed on a large level branch, not cross-wise like most birds, but the long way; and when he did that, he looked like a humpy knot on the branch. When there were no branches handy, he would use a rail or a log or a wall, or even the ground; but wherever he settled himself, he looked like a blotch of light and dark, and one could gaze right at him without noticing that a bird was there. That was the way Mother Nomer did, too—clowns both of them and always ready for the wonderful game of camouflage!
They had remarkable voices. There seemed to be just one word to their call. I am not going to tell you what that word is. There is a reason why I am not. The reason is, that I do not know. To be sure, I have heard nighthawks say it every summer for years, but I can't say it myself. It is a very funny word, but you will have to get one of them to speak it for you!
They came by all their different kinds of queerness naturally enough, Mis and Mother Nomer did, for it seemed to run in the family to be peculiar, and all their relatives had oddities of one kind or another. Take Cousin Whip-poor-will, who wears whiskers, for instance; and Cousin Chuck-will's widow, who wears whiskers that branch. You could tell from their very names that they would do uncommon things. And as for their more distant relatives, the Hummingbirds and Chimney Swifts, it would take a story apiece as long as this to begin to tell of their strange doings. But it is a nice, likable sort of queerness they all have; so very interesting, too, that we enjoy them the better for it.
There is one more wonderful thing yet that Mis and his mate did—and their twins with them; for before this happened, the children had grown to be as big as their parents, and a bit plumper, perhaps, though not enough to be noticed under their feathers. Toward the end of a pleasant summer, they joined a company of their kind, a sort of traveling circus, and went south for the winter. Just what performances they gave along the way, I did not hear; but with a whole flock of flying clowns on the wing, it seems likely that they had a gay time of it altogether!