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We contrasted our condition with that of tired invalids who were tossing on downy beds, and wooing sleep in vain. Nothing was so wholesome and invigorating as this bivouac in the forest. But, somehow, sleep did not come. The rain had ceased to patter, and began to fall with a steady determination, a sort of soak, soak, all about us. In fact, it roared on the rubber blanket, and beat in our faces.
As soon as she was alone she laid back the flannel which lay round the child's head, and examined every inch of its downy poll and puckered face, her warm breath making the tiny lips twitch in sleep as it travelled across them. Then she lifted the little nightgown and looked at the pink feet nestling in their flannel wrapping.
I clasped it to my bosom as a shield against invisible foes, but there was no sympathy in its downy softness. I sighed for a pillow beneath whose gentle heavings the heart of human kindness beats, I yearned to lay my head on a mother's breast. Yea, cold and breathless as it was now, beneath the clods of the valley, it would still be a sacred resting-place to me.
How they laughed together when Melanie came to announce that she had forgotten to put yeast in the cake, both her hands covered with sticky leaven, for all the world as if she were wearing winter gloves; or when, at Cizpra's command, she tried to take a little yellow downy chicken from the cold courtyard to a warm room, keeping up the while a lively duel with the jealous brood-hen, till finally Melanie was obliged to run.
"Yes, Ducklings are all downy; for I remember those that came out in June up at the Farm were, and their tiny little wings were as cunning and cute as could be," said Dodo. "When little Wood Ducks are hatched and become quite dry, their mother takes them in her beak, by the wing, one by one, and flies down to the ground with them.
"There," said I, as I placed my fair friend before a delicious little madonna of Carl Dolci "there is, perhaps, the triumph of colouring for the downy softness of that cheek the luscious depth of that blue eye the waving richness of those sunny locks, all is perfect fortunately so beautiful a head is not a monopoly, for he painted many copies of this picture."
You feel certain that the downy woodpecker is asleep in that neat little round hole on the southwest side of a tree trunk, just a little higher than you can reach. In the early afternoon you saw a red squirrel go gaily up a tall red oak and climb into his nest of leaves. You fancy he is snugly coiled there now.
When these fell, I saw that the dead leaves on the earth beneath had been well sprinkled by previous ejections of the same nature. I had discovered a Downy Woodpecker at work on his winter bedroom, and later I had reason to believe that he made this his nightly retreat during the cold months that followed.
She glanced at his round, innocuous face, with the downy mustache and ruminative eyes, and smiled irrepressibly. Then her own face grew grave. "I wonder! You see, Mr. North, it isn't all like a movie; there's an element of uncertainty that keeps a man quick on the trigger. I was living with friends at the Casa de Limas, as your father told you.
Then we find the same words, with the picture of flight and the reality of faith, used with another set of associations in another psalm, which says: 'He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shalt thou trust. That grates, one gets away from the metaphor too quickly; but if we preserve the literal meaning, and read, 'under His wings shalt thou flee for refuge, we have the picture of the chicken flying to the mother-bird when kites are in the sky, and huddling close to the warm breast and the soft downy feathers, and so with the spread of the great wing being sheltered from all possibility of harm.
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