[Footnote A:  I cannot find any account of the finding of the nest of this bird by Mr. Darling amongst Mr. Hume’s notes.—­Ed.]

The egg taken by Mr. Davison is an elongated, slightly pyriform oval.  The shell is moderately fine, but with only a very slight gloss.  The ground-colour is a pale slightly greyish green, and the whole egg is thickly (most thickly so about the large end, where the markings are almost perfectly confluent) mottled and streaked with pale brownish red.  It measures 0.98 by 0.67.

193.  Brachypteryx albiventris (Fairbank). The White-bellied Short-wing.

Callene albiventris, Fairb., Hume, Rough Draft N. & E. no. 339 bis.

The Rev. S.B.  Fairbank, to whom I have, owed much useful information and many valuable specimens, kindly sent me the subjoined account of the nidification of the White-bellied Short-wing in the Pulney Hills at an elevation of about 6500 feet:—­“In April, I found a nest in a hole in the side of the trunk of a large tree some 2 feet from the ground.  The hole was just large enough for the nest, and was lined with fine roots.  I surprised the bird on her nest several times.  There were two eggs in the nest when I first found it that were ‘hard-set’.  A month afterwards she laid two more in the same place, and I took them in good condition.  One egg measures 0.9 by 0.68 inch, and another 0.94 by 0.68 inch.  The ground-colour is grey, with a tinge of green, and it is thickly covered with small spots of bistre.”

Mr. Blanford, who saw the eggs, which I never did, describes them (and by analogy, I should infer more correctly) as “of an olive-brown colour, darker at the larger end, measuring 0.93 by 0.63 inch.”

An egg of this species sent me by Dr. Fairbank, measuring 0.93 by 0.66, is a somewhat elongated oval, slightly pointed towards the small end.  The shell is fine and fairly glossy; the ground-colour, so far as this is discernible, is greyish green, but it is so thickly clouded and mottled all over with a warm, brown, that but little of the ground-colour is any where traceable, and the general result when the egg is looked at from a short distance is that of a nearly uniform olive-brown.

Captain Horace Terry also found the nest of this bird on the Pulney Hills.  He says:—­“I met with it a few times in the big shola at Kodikanal, and got two nests, each with two fresh eggs; the first on the 7th June in a hole in a tree between 4 and 5 feet from the ground, a deep cup of green moss; the other, in a hole in the bank of a path running through the shola was of green moss and a few fine fern-roots.  Inside 1.75 inch deep and 2.5 inches across; outside a shapeless mass of moss filling up the hole it was built in.  The nest was very conspicuous to any one passing by.”

194.  Brachypteryx rufiventris (Blyth). The Rufous-bellied Short-wing.

Callene rufiventris, Blyth.  Jerd.  B. Ind. i, p. 496:  Hume, Rough Draft N. & E. no. 339.