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We saw a sleepy little owl on the dead branch of a pine-tree; we saw a rabbit cross the road and disappear in a clump of juniper, and squirrels run up and down trees and along the stone-walls with acorns in their mouths.
The pine-tree and the fir stopped quarrelling, and the snowdrop nestled closer to the vine, while the vine hugged the pine-tree very tightly. All were greatly alarmed. "Nonsense!" said the pine-tree, in a tone of assumed bravery. "No one would venture into the forest at such an hour." "Indeed! and why not?" cried a child's voice. "Will you not let me watch with you for the coming of the prince?"
No sooner had the jelly fish reached the shore than the sly monkey landed, and getting up into the pine-tree where the jelly fish had first seen him, he cut several capers amongst the branches with joy at being safe home again, and then looking down at the jelly fish said: "So many thanks for all the trouble you have taken! Please present my compliments to the Dragon King on your return!"
His lips quivered a little in the enjoyment of the flavor; then he looked benignantly with his unusually round eyes at Adam, saying cunningly: "If such grapes grow on your pine-trees, I wish the good Lord had given Father Noah a pine-tree instead of a vine. By the saints! The archbishop has no better wine in his cellar!
It had escaped from them once, and, when pursued, had taken a leap of sixty feet, from the top of a pine-tree down upon the roof of a house, without injury. This feat had led the grandmother of one of the boys to declare that the squirrel was bewitched, and the boys proposed to put the matter to further test by throwing the squirrel down a precipice six hundred feet high.
And would the starling, for whom he had nailed the little box high up in the pine-tree, come again next spring? It had picked off all the black berries from the elderberry, and had then gone away screaming; if it did not find any more elderberries, what would it eat then? And the boy's heart was heavy with grief if only he had given it a little bag of berries when it went away.
It was when thus reclining, after half a day's search for flowers, under the grateful shade of a pine-tree, now watching the white clouds that sent a brighter day-beam into these dark recesses, as they passed luminously overhead, and then noting the peculiar mapping of the grounds underneath the wood, diversified with mosses in swelling knolls, little islets of fern, and parterres of ginsengs and Solomon's-seals, in one of these cloisters of the forest, I was first greeted by the pensive note of the Green Warbler, as he seemed to titter in supplicatory tones, very slowly modulated, "Hear me, Saint Theresa!"
So she left the Golden Pot shining all alone under the pine-tree, and ran home as fast as she could. When she reached the house it was almost twilight, but her father was still in the garden. Every rose and lily had to be tied up after the shower, and he was but just finishing. He had the tin milk pan hung on him like a shield, because it rhymed with man.
He will sit far up on a dead twig of an old pine-tree, and utter a series of four notes, something like "do, mi, mi, do," repeating them without pausing till it is too dark to see him, all the time getting lower, sadder, more deliberate, till one feels like running out and committing suicide or annihilating the bird of ill-omen.
It even cheered him a trifle. "In case of a mix-up," thought he, "there couldn't be a better place for ambushing these infernal cannibals for mowing them down, wholesale for sending them skyhooting to Tophet, in bunches!" And with a grim smile, he worked his way cautiously toward Madison Forest and the pine-tree gate. As he drew near, his care redoubled. His grip on the revolver-butt tightened.
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