The Yellow- breasted Chat 133 perch like that from which he started. What mistress could turn a deaf ear to such love-making as that? And we can rest assured that his does not. Proof ? You will find it in some near-by bush but a few feet from the ground. A nest rather roughly but strongly made, sufficient for its pur- pose, and filled with four or five creamy eggs marked with reddish brown spots and a few lilac flecks, which the mother bird nestles into her golden bosom as tenderly as though neither she nor her jolly spouse ever thought such things as are imputed in former paragraphs. On second thought, per- haps, the previous reflections are base slanders. One cannot gaze upon the happy pair when they suspect no human biped is near, without wondering whether, if we really understood Chat language, we would interpret it just as we do. It may all mean entirely different subject matter, — and then, again, it may not. To human ears it sounds bad and, as Dr. J. M. Wheaton has pointed out, the Chat has a black mouth, and that certainly was not given him for nothing. I have often seen it stated that the Chat was a ventriloquist. Some other birds are also pretty generally accused of the same offense, but I could never really substantiate this in any case. True, the notes of some species are difficult to place, but I have observed that it is only the distance that the originator of the sound is from the hearer that is actually mislead- ing, and not the direction from which it comes. True, again, it is somewhat difficult to locate the direction in certain low sibilant notes that seem to have great carrying power, but I never observed any more than this, and I never heard a bird note that actually seemed to come from a false quarter. When one can hardly locate a sound, and sees a locality that looks as though it might contain the origin of it, we are very apt to make our eyesight and judgment influence our ears, and jump at a false conclusion; but this is an entirely different matter from true ventriloquism inasmuch as the origin of the imposture lies in the self-deceit of the hearer, and not in any actively misleading quality in the sound itself.
