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48 answers, perhaps; for I, too, am a Yankee. He was the man who told me about the throngs of sightseers that came here. The very publicity of the thing had been the birds' salvation, he was inclined to believe. The entire community had taken them under its protection, and with so many windows overlooking the place, and the police on the alert (I had noticed a placard near by, signed by the chief, laying down the law and calling upon all good citizens to help him enforce it), it would have been hard for anybody to meddle with the nest without coming to grief. At all events, the birds had so far escaped molestation, and the young, as I have said, would soon be on the wing. One of them was thrusting its full-grown, wide-awake, eager-looking, mouse-colored head out of the aperture as we talked.

"But why so much excitement over a family of woodpeckers?" some reader may be asking. Rarity, my friend; rarity and brilliant feathers. So far as appears from the latest catalogue of Massachusetts birds, this Newton nest is one of a very small number ever found in the State, and the very first