"Is the nest like this one in the drawing? This has a hole in the side."
"Somewhat like it, but it is built commonly of coarser materials. I mentioned also that the marsh wrens of either the salt or fresh water species were peculiar in their notes, for you can scarcely call it a song. It is a series of short sounds, seeming almost like the bubbling of air through water—somewhat like the noise which your feet make in stepping on the marshy ground, and yet it has a musical effect which is very pleasant."
[A FLYING SHIP.]
BY ELLA RODMAN CHURCH.
Almost every one has read of Ezekiel Green and his flying machine, and a great many boys and men have been quite sure that they could manufacture wings which would enable them to fly.
As long ago as the reign of James IV. of Scotland an Italian who pretended to be able to change common metals into gold, and who wasted a great deal of the King's money in this way, but all to no purpose, "took in hand to fly with wings" as far as France, and to be there before the King's ambassadors, who travelled in the ordinary way. He had a pair of wings made of feathers, and when these had been fastened upon him he flew off the wall of Stirling Castle, but only to fall heavily to the ground, and break his thigh-bone.
The abbot of Tarryland (for so he had been created by the credulous King) declared that the blame of this failure should be laid upon the fact that there were hen feathers in the wings, and that hens are more inclined to the barn-yard than the skies—a very ingenious way of defending himself; but it could not quiet the twinges in his broken limb.
Another experiment, which was made three hundred years later, was more successful. It was tried on a convict from the galleys, whose life was not thought too valuable to risk, and when ready for flight he must have been an object capable of frightening all the birds of the air. He was "surrounded with whirls of feathers, curiously interlaced, and extending gradually at suitable distances in a horizontal direction from his feet to his neck." When first launched from a height of seventy feet, his feelings could not have been enviable, and the great mass of spectators watched him in almost breathless silence. But instead of falling, he went down slowly, and landed on his feet, with no inconvenience except a feeling of sea-sickness.
Nothing seems to have come of it, as men are not flying through the air yet; but the Flying Ship may possibly have led to the balloon. This strange scheme made quite a sensation in the year 1709, and the first account of it was written in Portuguese. It was invented by a Brazilian priest, who wanted the King of Portugal to adopt it.