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Thus, last evening they gave a new piece which was really exquisite. There was a song in it, beginning: 'He was a woodpecker, A little woodpecker, A young woodpecker and the chorus imitated the cry of the woodpecker! Well, it was charming, and the whole of Paris will sing that song with delight for a year. I also shall do like the whole of Paris, and I shall be happy."
The Tamanaquas of South America have a tradition that the human race sprang from the fruits of the date palm after the Mexican age of water. Again, our English nursery fable of the parsley-bed, in which little strangers are discovered, is perhaps, "A remnant of a fuller tradition, like that of the woodpecker among the Romans, and that of the stork among our Continental kinsmen."
'Never have I seen the like, Macumazahn, never, he said. 'The battles of my people are as the play of children to what this will be. Thinkest thou that they will fight it out? 'Ay, I answered sadly, 'to the death. Content thyself, "Woodpecker", for once shalt thou peck thy fill. Time went on, and still there was no sign of an attack.
The hammering of the infrequent woodpecker, the call of the lonely bird, the drumming of the solitary partridge, all these sounds do but emphasize the lonesomeness of nature. It seems easy to begin life over again on the simplest terms.
The orphans looked at each other apprehensively. "What's that?" demanded Tim. "It's when he comes to hear you say your verses an' your catechism," explained Jake soothingly; "and you'll all show him how much you know; an' then he prays, and you must be awful good and quiet. Eh, little woodpecker?"
And Bibbee was changed into the woodpecker, or climbing tree bird, who is always running up trees as if he wanted to be building other ways to the than the famous roadway of his Euloowirree, the building of which had won him his wife. An old man lived with his two wives, the Mooninguggahgul sisters, and his two sons.
"The crowing of a Rooster, the screech of a Night Owl, the Hawk's harsh scream, the laughing and hammering of a Woodpecker, all answer the same good purpose as a song. "The first family of Songless Perching Birds is that of the Tyrant Flycatchers, and the first of these birds with which we have to do is the one you have just seen. He belongs to the guild of Sky Sweepers.
At the tip of one sat a sparrow-hawk, and to the trunk of another clung a red-bellied woodpecker, who, with characteristic foolishness, sat beside his hole calling persistently, and then, as if determined to publish what other birds so carefully conceal, went inside, thrust out his head, and resumed his clatter.
I did not repeat my visit to Lake Bradford; but, not to give up the ivory-bill too easily, and because I must walk somewhere, I went again as far as the palmetto scrub. This time, though I still missed the woodpecker, I was fortunate enough to come upon a turkey. In the thickest part of the wood, as I turned a corner, there she stood before me in the middle of the road.
There he was, as neighbourly as you please, and not in the least awed by my intrusion; there he was, far out on the limb of a dead tree, stepping energetically up and down, like a sailor reefing a sail, and rapping and tapping as he worked a downy woodpecker. "Good morning, sir," I said. He stopped for scarcely a second, cocked one eye at me, and went back to his work again.
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