You are so candid about your age that I shall tell you mine! I am astonished to find myself sixty-eight—very near the Psalmist's threescore and ten. Much illness and much sorrow, and then I woke up to find myself old, and as if I had lost a great part of my life. Let us hope it was not all lost.
I think you can understand me when I say that I have a great fund of love, and no one to spend it upon, because there are not any to whom[Pg 100] I could give it fully, and I love my pets so dearly, but I dare not and cannot enjoy it fully because—they die, or get injured, and then my misery is intense. I feel as if I could tell you much, because your sympathy is so refined and so tender and true. Cannot I be a sort of second mother to you? I am sure the first one was often praying for blessings for you, and in this, at least, I resemble her.
Am I tiresome writing all this? It just came, and you said I was to write what did. We have had some nice rain, but followed not by warmth, but a cruel east wind.
ABOUT WRENS.
This year I have seen wrens' nests in three different kinds of places—one built in the angle of a doorway, one under a bank, and a third near the top of a raspberry bush; this last was so large that when our gardener first saw it, he thought it was a swarm of bees. It seems a pleasure to this active bird to build; he will begin to build several nests sometimes before he completes one for Jenny Wren to lay her eggs and make her nursery. Think how busy both he and Jenny are when the sixteen young ones come out of their shells—little helpless gaping things wanting feeding in their turns the livelong summer day! What hundreds and thousands of small insects they devour! they catch flies with good-sized wings. I have seen a parent wren with its beak so full that the wings stood out at each side like the whiskers of a cat.
Once in America in the month of June, a mower hung up his coat under a shed near a barn: two or three days passed before he had occasion to put it on again. Thrusting his arm up the sleeve he found it completely filled with something, and on pulling out the mass he found it to be the nest of a wren completely finished and lined with feathers. What a pity that all the labor of the little pair had been in vain!
Great was the distress of the birds, who vehemently and angrily scolded him for destroying their house; happily it was an empty one, without either eggs or young birds.