Mr. Brewster describes its song as beginning "with a succession of five or six fine, shrill, high-pitched, somewhat faltering notes, and ending with a short, rapid, rather explosive warble. The opening notes are given in a rising key, but the song falls rapidly at the end. The whole may be expressed as follows: Tzee, tzee, tzee, tzee, ti, ti, ter, ti-ti-ti-ti." Its call note is simply ti-ti uttered in a fine and well modulated voice that is scarcely audible.
[Illustration: GOLDEN-CROWNED KINGLET. (Regulus satrapa.) Life-size. FROM COL. CHI. ACAD. SCIENCES.]
The Golden-crown selects cone-bearing trees for its nest. This is usually a pensil structure and is hung from the branches at from four to fifty or more feet from the ground. It is globular in form with the entrance near the top. Mosses and dead leaves are used in its construction and it is lined with soft and fine fibers of bark and feathers.
Someone has said of a Golden-crowned Kinglet: "I often spoke to him as if he were a real person; and he appreciated my words of praise, too, without doubt, for he would come scurrying near, disporting his head so that I could catch the gleam of his amber coronal, with its golden patch for a center piece."
It was a chilly winter Saturday. Though the winds were cold, the sunshine was bright and warm. After dinner Jacob put on his overcoat and new red mittens and went, as he often did, with his father, who was sexton of Evergreen cemetery. While his father was busy Jacob amused himself.
He had never before noticed how bare the great trees looked. Their limbs reached out like hundreds of crooked arms between him and the blue sky. As he looked around here and there he could see a tree wearing a dark green coat. Most of them were small, but some were tall and pointed. A pretty good sized, umbrella-shaped one grew near where his father was digging a grave.
Full of boyish life and spirits he ran to it playfully shouting: "I am a squirrel hunting a nut and will climb up among your branches." But he tried in vain. The lowest limbs were so high above his head that he could not reach them.
"Never mind," said he, "I will hunt a nut on the ground."
Dropping on all fours he began to crawl around. Soon his hand came down upon something hard under the dead leaves which covered the ground. Now he thought he had really found a nut. It was roundish, with blunt spines and woody, and like no nut which he knew. Hunting a loose brick he cracked it upon a stone. Two or three little round things with gauzy wings dropped out.