The young birds of both families were anxious for the concert to begin. Papa Swift, who was considered the best singer by everybody, flew to the very top of the oak tree and began his prettiest song. It was not long before several Swifts and Humming Birds had joined him. They all sang and flew from branch to branch. A bird concert is not like one given by children. The children all sing the same song and sing it together, but in a bird concert everyone sings to please himself. He begins just when he feels like it, and sings his own song. But for all that, a bird concert is very pretty music. Some proud birds, who were spending the afternoon near by, and who had better voices than the ones in the oak tree, pretended that they did not like such a "noise," as they called it, and flew away across the river. But this did not keep the Swifts and Humming Birds from enjoying themselves.
Before the time for good-byes came they promised to see each other often, and everyone promised to be ready to go away in the spring. Little Cyprelus dreamed that night of the pleasant times she would have the next summer in the pretty place grandfather Humming Bird had told about, and Coquette and Topaza said they wondered if the lady who lived by the beautiful lake would have as many flower-beds this summer as she had last.
Now this lady, whom grandfather Humming Bird had been telling about, was Aunt Dorothy. She was a great bird lover, and it made her happy to find that she could number the Swifts among her particular bird friends when they came the next summer to live in her yard.
One morning Aunt Dorothy waked up very early. She looked out of her eastern window and saw that the sky beyond the lake was a beautiful rose color, but the sun was not yet risen. Aunt Dorothy was sleepy, so she closed her eyes again, but just as she did so she heard a strange twittering noise and wondered where it came from. Her curiosity was so great that she could not go to sleep again, so she rose and dressed herself and, after saying a little prayer to the great All-Father to keep her through the day, she went to find out what the noise was. But she had already thought that it must be birds in the chimney. She climbed up on a chair and listened near the chimney hole. Soon she heard a fluttering of wings and a chirping. Mamma Swift was coming with some worms for her babies' breakfast. Her babies, like a great many girl and boy babies, waked up very early in the morning and were quite troublesome. In order to quiet them, Mamma Swift was forced to find some worms before sunrise. Aunt Dorothy was delighted. If she made a little noise near the chimney hole the baby birds thought it was their mother coming with food for them, and they stretched their heads up out of the nest, so Aunt Dorothy could see them. Often, when she was writing or reading in her room she could hear the birds in the chimney. She knew the papa and mamma bird had to work very hard, for they came many, many times a day with food for the baby Swifts. But there came a day when the nest in the chimney was empty, for the little birds had gone away with their parents and were learning to fly through the trees and to catch insects to eat. It made Aunt Dorothy lonesome to sit in her room after that, and instead she used to go out of doors where she could watch the birds.
One day she took a fire-shovel and with it managed to loosen the nest and take it out of the chimney without breaking it. The shape of it was like half of a deep saucer, and it was made principally of the petioles or stems of grapevine leaves laid across each other as the logs are in building log houses. The big ends of the leaf stems alternated with the small ones and stuck out, making a bristling outside wall for the nest. There were two or three very slender cedar twigs no bigger than a darning-needle used in making the nest, and these the birds had brought from a long distance. The nest looked as if it had been covered with glue, and this was because the birds had covered it with their saliva and that held the leaf stems together just as glue would. Aunt Dorothy knew a man who went to some islands in the Pacific ocean, where the Pigmy Swifts live. Pigmy means little, and these Swifts are smaller than the ones who built in Aunt Dorothy's chimney. The Pigmy Swifts build their nests in caves. Some of them build very far in the caves, where it is entirely dark. Aunt Dorothy's friend went one day with another man to a cave to get some bird's nests.
These men had a ladder made of rattan, on which they had to climb in order to reach the nests. The man who climbed highest had a long four-pronged spear, with a lighted candle fixed on it a few inches below the prongs. By the aid of the light he found some nests. With the spear he took them unbroken from the rock. When he had gotten a nest between the prongs of the spear, he held it so the man lower down on the ladder could reach the end of it, and let it down through his hands until he could take the bird's nest from between the prongs of the spear and put it in his pocket.
When Aunt Dorothy's friend came back to America he brought some of these bird's nests with him and gave one to her.
The Chinese people think these bird's nests are very good to eat, and make soup of them. Aunt Dorothy put the nest, which she had taken from the chimney, into her cabinet with the one from the island in the Pacific ocean. One day in the fall she took some of her little friends for a walk and they picked up a basketful of leaf stems under the elm and linden trees, and with them they made some bird's nests which they covered with glue and which looked very much like the one Aunt Dorothy found in her chimney.
Mary Grant O'Sheridan.