"Angelina has a hat With wings on every side; Slaughter o' the innocents Those pretty wings supplied. Sign of barbarity, Sign of vulgarity-- That winged hat."
Well, let Angelina's hat pass for what it is worth to her. It is no more than the redbirds have had to submit to all their life history. There isn't a savage tribe but has made use of bright feathers for dress, either in skins or quills. The dark-skinned native is "dressed for church" if he wear a single feather tuft in his scalp-lock, or a frail shoulder-cape of crimson breasts, stripped from the bird in the bush.
It may be the tanager has a sort of dull instinct to hide himself on this account in the deep foliage, deeming it the better part of valor to keep out of harm's way when a nature-lover sits on the toadstool-bedecked log to watch for him.
His mate, of dull greenish yellow, has less enemies in the disguise of admirers, and her little heart has no call to flutter when the so-called nature-lover haunts the woods. She goes on with her nest-building on the arm of a maple or even lonely apple-tree, making haste, for well she knows the season is short in which to raise their single brood. By the middle of August they must be off, have the wings of the young grown sufficient strength; and yet the old birds only arrived from their warmer clime in the South when May was half over, or later.
Like the grosbeak's, the tanager's nest is loosely built of twigs and stalks, transparent from below, as if ventilation were more necessary than softness. The dull blue eggs, spotted with brown or purple, may be distinctly seen from beneath when the sun is shining overhead. But why worry the mother bird by long gazing? She is in great distress. Were the ear of the nature-lover properly tuned he would understand her to be saying, "They're mine, they're mine. I beg, I beg. Don't touch, don't take."
But in due time the young are juveniles, not nurslings, and they leave the nest, too soon the worse for wear on account of its careless build. At first the thin dress of the young is greenish yellow, like the mother, and they may pass unnoticed amid the late summer foliage. The male juveniles, during their first year, somewhere change to brighter hues in spots and dashes of red and black, as if their clothes had been patched with left-overs from their fathers' wardrobes. The fathers themselves, before they fly to the warm South, drop their scarlet feathers, like tatters, amid the ferns and blue-berries, and girls pick them up for the adorning of doll hats. No merrier sight, and none more innocent of character, than this of little girls searching for what is left of the beautiful summer visitor, picking up, as it were, the shreds of his memory. These scarlet feathers, together with those of the summer yellowbird, placed in layers or helter-skelter in a case of gauze, make a fairy pillow for winter times, pretty to look at. They come with thistle-down and milkweed tassels, and sumach droppings and maple leaves, and the first oozing of spruce gum in the woods. Yes, and beechnuts and belated goldenrod, and the first frosts that nip the cheek of the cranberry in the bog.