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"You may have heard about me," and he recited this little verse: "The king was in the kitchen, Counting out his money; The queen was in the parlor, Eating bread and honey; The maid was in the garden, Hanging out the clothes, Along came a blackbird, Who nipped off her nose." The fat man got up off the kitchen floor.
"You seem to be built for eating, too," he observed. Grandfather Mole soon confessed that Mr. Blackbird's mention of angleworms had made him so hungry that he was ready to promise to do as Mr. Blackbird had proposed. So Mr. Blackbird cried that it was a bargain.
Other boys frolicked that day, but James sawed wood, and I think of all the lads in the town the happiest was the one in the new mittens, who whistled like a blackbird as he filled his mother's wood-box." "That's a first rater!" cried Dan, who enjoyed a simple matter-of-face story better than the finest fairy tale; "I like that fellow after all."
You know that bird I told you of the blackbird that had its mate shot, and used to come to sing to old Dame Bakewell's bird from the tree opposite. A rascal knocked it over the day before yesterday, and the dame says her bird hasn't sung a note since." "Extraordinary!" Hippias muttered abstractedly. "I remember the verses." "But where's your moral?" interposed the wrathful Adrian.
Peter scratched a long ear with a long hind foot, trying to think of some place to go. Just then he heard the clear "peep, peep, peep" of the Hylas, the sweet singers of the Smiling Pool. "That's where I'll go!" exclaimed Peter. "I haven't been to the Smiling Pool for some time. I'll just run over and pay my respects to Grandfather Frog, and to Redwing the Blackbird.
"Mine are the treasures Nature strews With lavish hand around; My precious gems are sparkling dews, My wealth the verdant ground. Mine are the songs that freely gush From hedge, and bush, and tree; The soaring lark and speckled thrush Discourse rich melody. "A cloud comes floating o'er the sun, The woods' green glories fade; But hark! the blackbird has begun His wild lay in the shade.
I fancied also that I heard the voice of the cuckoo and the blackbird, and at last the whole forest seemed to join in. I heard children's voices, the sound of bells, and the song of birds; the most glorious melodies and all came from the elves' maypole, namely, my sausage-peg.
The little bird in his scarlet and brown plumage looked more richly coloured and even more beautiful than usual, as, supported by his slender legs, with his head thrown back and his feathers puffed out, he poured forth his light-hearted carol to the leafless woods. "How can you sing on this miserable morning?" said the Blackbird, gloomily, and indeed half contemptuously.
Anyhow, the persecutions continued, increasing in fury until they could not be borne, and the blackbird tried to escape by hiding in the bramble. But he was not permitted to rest there; out he was soon driven and away into another bush, and again into still another further away, and finally he was hunted over the sheltering wall into the bleak wind on the other side.
He abhorred the dull and savage joy of the sportsman in a lucky shot, an unerring aim, and once when I met him in the country he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in bringing down a blackbird, and he described the poor, stricken, glossy thing, how it lay throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as he might have given a wounded child.
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