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Beside me stood the tall flower of the mint; I saw the sweet-smelling thyme flower and one or two wild strawberries. There came up to me from fields below me the beautiful smell of hay, and there was a break in the voice of the cuckoo.
There was a voice in that empty room; and the words it uttered stirred the doctor to a greater surprise, a greater dread than the words of Cuckoo. Her painted lips related that which might well be a legend of her fancy or of her hate. This voice related a reality and no legend. As the doctor sat there he conversed of many strange and evil matters, of many discomforting affairs.
"I wasn't the least sleepy at the mandarins' ball. What fun it was! I believe that cuckoo made me fall asleep on purpose to make me fancy it was a dream. Was it a dream?" She began to feel confused and doubtful, when suddenly she felt something hurting her arm, like a little lump in the bed.
He wondered what her connection with the two youths was, and perhaps his face showed something of his wonder, for Cuckoo added, after a long glance at him: "It's true; yes, it is," as if she read his doubts. "How do you come to know it?" the doctor said, not at all unkindly, but as if anxious to elucidate matters. "Why, I tell you I can see it plain.
It would have been a hard task, indeed, to tell at first which was the greater of the two. Cuckoo neither knew nor cared. She did not even differentiate the two passions or say to herself that there were two. That was not her way. She felt quickly and strongly, and she acted on her feelings with the peculiar and almost wild promptitude that such a life as hers seems to breed in woman's nature.
But where, during the days when the vociferous cuckoo, with hoarse chuckle and dissyllabic call and wild bubbling cry was so much with us where, in this period of many pleasant noises was the cuckoo's mate, or maid, or messenger, the quaint and beautiful wryneck?
'The Faithful Friend. Now there's what I call a picture. I knowed a guy who owned a dog that looked just like this. A setter or something." "Go on. That ain't a setter. It's a spaniel." "You're cuckoo, Mike. Tell me it's a spaniel! Let's put it up ahead. It's probably one of the prize winners. Here's a daffy one. 'At Play. What's at play? I don't see nothin' at play. Take a look, Mike."
One instant I held that vociferous cuckoo baby, to have a good look at him, speaking soothingly to the mother the while, and then opened my hand, when he half flew, half scrambled, to the other side of the road, and set up another cry, more like that of his mother.
That venerable and shrewd old man, learned in human nature as well as in law, comprehended in a moment, and said kindly, "You misunderstand him. Witnesses do not read letters out in court. Let the letter be handed up to me." This was fortunate, for the court cuckoo, who intones most letters, would have read all the sense and pathos out of this, with his monotonous sing-song.
How has that "blessed bird" and "sweet messenger of spring," the "cuckoo," imposed upon the poetic sensibilities of its native land! And what is this cuckoo which has thus bewitched all the poets? What is the personality behind that "wandering voice?" What the distinguishing trait which has made this wily attendant on the spring notorious from the times of Aristotle and Pliny?
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