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 usually of the rich color of old ivory very thickly splashed with a warm purplish brown.

This summer there were four nestlings in the great, untidy nest; and they kept both their devoted parents busy, catching, and tearing up into convenient morsels, fish enough to satisfy their vigorous appetites. At the moment when the father osprey returned from the lake with the trout which he had just caught they were full-fed and fast asleep, their downy heads and half-feathered, scrawny necks comfortably resting across one another's pulsing bodies. The mother bird, who had recently fed them, was away fishing in the long, green-gray seas beyond the hogback. The father, seeing them thus satisfied, tore up the trout and swallowed it, with dignified deliberation, himself. Food was plentiful, and he was not overhungry. Then, having scrupulously wiped his beak and preened his feathers, he settled himself upright on the edge of the nest and became apparently lost in contemplation of the spacious and tranquil scene outspread beneath him. A pair of bustling little crow-blackbirds, who had made their own small home among the outer sticks of the gigantic nest, flew backward and forward diligently, bringing insects in their bills for their naked, newly hatched brood. Their metallic, black plumage shone iridescently, purple