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It was all true, just as the school-master had told him; the big, beautiful houses he saw now and then up avenues of blossoming locusts; the endless stone fences, the whitewashed barns, the woodlands and pastures; the meadow-larks flitting in the sunlight and singing everywhere; fluting, chattering blackbirds, and a strange new black bird with red wings, at which Chad wondered very much, as he watched it balancing itself against the wind and singing as it poised.
I find the berries of the laurel, which is a species of cherry, very attractive to blackbirds, and as long as there are any left they seem to prefer them to the apples. In 1895 cuckoos came to the rescue of my young plum orchard; there were dozens of them at work on the nine acres at once, and they must have cleared away an immense number of the grubs.
At last, 1448, he set out against the Sultan with an army of twenty-four thousand of his most trusty soldiers. This time it was on the frontier of Servia, on the "Field of Blackbirds," that Hunyady encountered Sultan Amurath, who had an army of one hundred and fifty thousand men again more than five times the number of the Christians.
Cuckoos, thrushes, blackbirds, and sparrows gave forth a perfect confusion of song and twitter. The road was spotted white with the fallen leaves of apple-blossoms, and the sparkling grey dew still lingered on the grass and flowers. Two swans floated into view in front of the women, and then crossed the water towards them.
They killed everything that did not pay for its eating. They shot the blackbirds because they pecked the fruit, and killed the hedgehogs lest they should suck the cows; they poisoned the crickets for eating the crumbs in the kitchen, and smothered the cicadas which used to sing all summer in the lime trees.
But it must be admitted that Blackie himself looked rather bored, and might have gone off for breakfast any time, if he had dared. As a matter of fact, however, the bird did not stand upon the Register of Bad Deeds as being a terror of even the mildest kind of blackbirds. Red-backed shrike was her name, female was her sex, and from Africa had she come.
And have you not watched these nests swinging about in the wind, and wondered that they did not fall? Some of our birds build in holes of trees, some line their nests beautifully with any soft thing they can find; blackbirds and thrushes make theirs of mud.
"And aunt Hannah, too," chimed in Salina. "Oh! I'd forgot her," said uncle Nat, looking wistfully toward the milk-room door, "I'm afraid it won't do, she'll think but here they come, like a flock of blackbirds!"
The procession passed and re-passed from end to end of the field with solemn words of exorcism accompanied by the tinkling of a little bell, the blackbirds constantly rising before them only to light behind them. "At their return," says Gyles, "I told a French lad that the friar had done no service and recommended them to shoot the birds.
The flock distributed itself upon the hillside; you drank of the living stream; you ate your sweet, brown bread in the shade, and you listened, doubtless, to blackbirds piping in the grove. Is not that so, shepherd?" "It is, sire," answered David, with a sigh; "and to the bees at the flowers, and, maybe, to the grape gatherers singing on the hill."
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