L. Maria Child.
[A] There was a superstition that whoever slept on fairy ground was carried away by the fairies.
THE BIRD'S-NEST IN THE MOON.
I love to go to the Moon. I never shake off sublunary cares and sorrows so completely as when I am fairly landed on that beautiful island.[A] A man in the Moon may see Castle Island, the city of Boston, the ships in the harbor, the silver waters of our little archipelago, all lying, as it were, at his feet. There you may be at once social and solitary,—social, because you see the busy world before you; and solitary because there is not a single creature on the island, except a few feeding cows, to disturb your repose.
I was there last summer, and was surveying the scene with my usual emotions, when my attention was attracted by the whirring wings of a little sparrow, that, in walking, I had frightened from her nest.
This bird, as is well known, always builds its nest on the ground. I have seen one, often, in the middle of a cornhill, curiously placed in the centre of the five green stalks, so that it was difficult, at hoeing time, to dress the hill without burying the nest.
This sparrow had built hers beneath a little tuft of grass more rich and thickset than the rest of the herbage around it. I cast a careless glance at the nest, saw the soft down that lined it, the four little speckled eggs which enclosed the parents' hope. I marked the multitude of cows that were feeding around it, one tread of whose cloven feet would crush both bird and progeny into ruin.
I could not but reflect on the dangerous condition to which the creature had committed her most tender hopes. A cow is seeking a bite of grass; she steps aside to gratify that appetite; she treads on the nest, and destroys the offspring of the defenceless bird.