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See, there he sits, with his moustachios hanging down to his chin, and his pig-tail to his heels, and the blue dragon embroidered on his breast, watching while they prepare the hall for a grand dinner. There will be a stew of puppy dog, and another of kittens, and bird's-nest soup; and then the players will come and act part of the nine-night tragedy, and we will look through the lattice.
Willingly hurrying to the place of execution, the murdered men had saved the calculating blacks the trouble of carrying their carcasses. Then four went back for the nervous escapee. He was safe, for the tracks were as obvious to them as a plough furrow to a European. Crouching beside a fallen, decaying tree, where bird's-nest ferns grew outrageously gross, they found him; and they jeered.
Nobody looks for an old rheumatic creatur'. She's more out o' the runnin' 'n a last year's bird's-nest." "Why, aunt Ann!" cried Amelia, in unmistakable joy. "I'm tickled to death to see you. Here, Amos, I'll help get her out." The driver, a short, thick-set man of neutral, ashy tints and a sprinkling of hair and beard, trudged round the oxen and drew the rocking-chair forward without a word.
The process of petrifaction requires some months, or perhaps a year or two, varying with the size of the article to be operated upon. The articles are placed in the cave, under the drippings from the roof, and a hard deposit is formed upon them, and sometimes, as in the case of a bird's-nest, causes a curious result, every straw and hair being immortalized and stiffened into stone.
Ramsey had understood not a fifth nor a tenth of his grandfather's talk, and already he had "forgotten" all of it yet not only were there many, many times in the boy's later life when, without ascertainable cause, he would remember the sunlight falling upon the old man's white head, to make that semblance of a glittering bird's-nest there, but with the picture came recollections of words and sentences spoken by the grandfather, though the listener, half-drowsily, had heard but the sound of an old, earnest voice and even the veteran's meaning finally took on a greater definiteness till it became, in the grandson's thoughts, something clear and bright and beautiful that he knew without being just sure where or how he had learned it.
The nest requires a structure round it like a cage, so that the fledglings might be prevented from leaving it till better able to save themselves. Those who go to South Kensington to look at the bird's-nest collection there should think of this if they hear any one discoursing on infallible instinct on the one hand, or evolution on the other.
He broke through the slight herbage about the place where the bushes grew thickest, and, getting into an open space, had a fair view of the particular shrub wherein were the bird's-nest and his birdlings.
We slid down the edge of the hill to the burn, where the massive boulders and shattered rocks were camouflaged by the painting of moss and lichen, the ginger, turmeric, caladium, and dracaena, and by the overhanging palms covered with the rich bird's-nest ferns.
After travelling and sojourning nearly ten years in the country, I have never seen a boy throw a stone at a sparrow, or climb a tree for a bird's-nest.
When he was tired of climbing trees, he picked up all the scattered nests, and laid them in a long row on the grass. They looked dismal enough. There is something in the very make of a bird's-nest which rouses thoughts of blue or red-spotted eggs, of callow young birds, with their large hungry eyes and beaks, or of twittering fledglings, training for a shimmer life of pleasure.
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