Hummingbird feeding has been graphically described more than once; but when the food-bearer arrived I seized my glass, eager to see it again. This is the way my fairy-like mother administered the staff of life to her tender birdlings. Alighting on the edge of the nest, she leaned over, and with her beak jerked a little head into sight above the edge; then down the baby's throat she thrust her long beak its whole length; and it looked actually longer than the youngster itself. Then she prodded and shook the unfortunate nestling, who seemed to hold on, till I wondered his head did not come off. It was truly fearful to witness. In a moment, shaking off, apparently with difficulty, that one, who dropped out of sight, she jerked up the other, and treated it in the same rough way, shaking her own body from head to tail by her exertion. Thus alternately she fed them, three or four times, before she finished; and then she calmly slipped on to the nest, wriggling and twisting about as if she were pawing them over with her feet. There she sat for five or six minutes before darting away for fresh supplies, while I wondered if the two victims of this Spartan method were lying dead, stabbed to death, or smothered, by their own mother. But I did her tenderness and her motherhood injustice. Regularly every half hour she came and repeated this murderous-looking process, unless, as often happened, she was frightened away by the people about.
Till her little ones were two weeks old, the devoted if apparently ungentle parent continued to feed them at intervals of thirty minutes, the neck-dislocating performance being always as violent as I have described. After that date she came more frequently, every fifteen or twenty minutes, and their development went on more rapidly. At the early age of five and six days, even before their eyes were open, the young birds began to show that they had minds of their own, and knew when they had enough (which some folk bigger than birds never know). When one was sufficiently filled, or sufficiently racked, it would shut its mouth and refuse to open, though mamma touched it gently with her beak.
"The world slipped away and I was in fairyland," wrote my old friend the Enthusiast, while watching, in another part of the country that same summer, the nest-building of a hummingbird. To me, also, the study of the life and affairs of this nest, to which I gave nearly every hour of daylight for weeks, seemed like a glimpse into that land of childhood's dreams, excepting when the outer world obtruded too rudely. For the life that went on under and around that charmed spot was far from fairy-like. The "hard facts" of human existence were ever uppermost, and there were a thousand disturbances between breakfast and bedtime. Indeed, the nest was the neighborhood show; everybody longed to pull down the branch and look at it. Men, women, and boys; master, mistress, and maids; horses, cattle, and birds, conspired to keep up an excitement around the apple-tree. It seemed a magnet to draw to itself all the noise and confusion of that peaceful village.