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The bustling crowd loses no time, and although moving in concert, each bird is occupied, on its own account, in searching bark or leaf or twig; the barbets visit every clayey nest of termites on the trees which lie in the line of march. In a few minutes the host is gone, and the forest path remains deserted and silent as before.
I spent some time watching an assemblage of a species of bird called by the natives Tumburi-para, on the Cecropia trees. It is the Monasa nigrifrons of ornithologists, and has a plain slate-coloured plumage with the beak of an orange hue. It belongs to the family of Barbets, most of whose members are remarkable for their dull, inactive temperament.
A striking feature of the great Himalayan barbet is its massive yellow bill, which is as large as that of some species of toucan. Although the bird displays a number of brilliant colours, it is not at all easy to distinguish from its leafy surroundings. It is one of those birds which are heard more often than seen. Barbets are never so happy as when listening to their own voices.
The governor and his detachment were issuing from the western gate as he left, and he accompanied them part of the way, still disguised as a merchant, and mounted on his horse, with a large portmanteau behind him, and saddlebags on either side full of gunpowder and ammunition. The Camisard chief mixed with the men, talking with them freely about the Barbets and their doings.
There he declared himself to be Count Broglio's nephew, and said that he had met a company of the Barbets, or Camisards, and had defeated them, taking six prisoners; that he was afraid to keep these prisoners in the village overnight lest their friends should rescue them; and that he wished to lodge them in the castle for safety.
At another time, though the two lads, eagerly observant and with the doctor to back them, needed no showing, their guide pointed to the many brilliantly-tinted birds of the thrush family, at the barbets and trogons, not so brilliant as those of the Western world, but each lovely in itself, while as they went on and on along their meandering river path, the birds that struck them as being most novel and at the same time tame in the way in which they came down the overhanging branches of the great forest trees, as if their curiosity had been excited by the strangers, were the many-tinted plantain eaters, with their crested heads, and the lovely green and crimson touracoos, which, while their violet and crimson relatives wore, as it were, a feather casque, displayed on their part a vivid green ornamentation that passed from beak to nape, which when they were excited looked more like a plume.
Regiments ready to act in harmony with the military commissions purge the South and the valley of the Rhone; thenceforth, there are no more roving bands in the rural districts, while brigandage on a grand scale, constantly repressed, ceases, and after this, that on a small scale. No more chouans, chauffeurs, or barbets; The mail-coach travels without a guard, and the highways are safe.
Shortly after, a trooper was observed galloping towards them at full speed along the Montpellier Road, without arms or helmet. He was almost out of breath when he came up, and could only exclaim that "All is lost! Count Broglie and Captain Poul are killed, and the Barbets are pursuing the remainder of the royal troops into the city!"
Barbets are heavily-built birds of medium size, armed with formidable beaks, which they do not hesitate to use for aggressive purposes. As regards the nests they excavate, the eggs they lay, the pad that grows on the hocks of young birds, and their flight, they resemble their cousins the woodpeckers.
The parrots are the most striking example, but we have also a group of green pigeons in the East; and the barbets, leaf-thrushes, bee-eaters, white-eyes, turacos, and several smaller groups, have so much green in their plumage as to tend greatly to conceal them among the foliage.
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