Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/60



are two birds in Newton, the present summer, that have perhaps attracted more attention than any pair of Massachusetts birds ever attracted before; more, by a good deal, I imagine, than was paid to a pair of crows that, for some inexplicable reason, built a nest and reared a brood of young a year ago in a back yard on Beacon Hill, in Boston. I refer to a pair of red-headed woodpeckers that have a nest (at this moment containing young birds nearly ready to fly) in a tall dead stump standing on the very edge of the sidewalk, like a lamp-post. The road, it should be said, is technically unfinished; one of those "private ways," not yet "accepted" by the city and therefore legally "dangerous," though in excellent condition and freely traveled. If the birds had intended to hold public receptions daily,—as they have done with-