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Except the tomb of the young musician Pergolese, who composed the original Stabat Mater there is little else to see, and we gladly ascend the tower in order to gain a bird’s eye view of the town from a point of vantage whither noisy coachmen, troublesome beggars and impudent ragamuffins cannot pursue.
While a pigeon is held by one man, another pushes one of the bird’s tail-feathers well through the quill, which is then fastened in its place by two minute wooden wedges. A moment later the pigeon is tossed up into the air, and we witness the working of that mysterious instinct which all our modern science leaves unexplained.
His hair was as towsled as the twigs of an abandoned bird’s nest; water was dripping from the corners of his mouth; his eyes were inflamed; his glasses were on the tip of his nose. Nothing could have made Dorothea more pleased with the story Daniel had told her than Herr Carovius’s ravings. Her eyes were opened wide, her mouth was thirsty. If she had hesitated at times before, she did so no more.
The thing cried and cried, beating at the glass with wings as powerful as a bird’s, and the girl, startled and slightly repelled, placed the moth on her night table, imprisoned under the tumbler. For a while it fluttered and flapped and cried out in its strange, uncanny way, then settled on the sheet of paper, quivering its wings, both eyes like living coals.
Bird’s return, more than half a mile of closely-packed ice intervened between the Fury and the open water in which we were beating, and before the morning this barrier had increased to four or five miles in breadth.
His pointed beard was small and scanty, and his lips, which smiled frequently, were as thin as two threads. His nose was not long, but sharp, like a bird’s beak. “To all appearances a malicious soul, full of petty pride,” thought Miüsov. He felt altogether dissatisfied with his position. A cheap little clock on the wall struck twelve hurriedly, and served to begin the conversation.
However, the bird, who had only been stunned, recovering himself gave me so many boxes with his wings, on both sides of my head and body, though I held him at arm’s-length, and was out of the reach of his claws, that I was twenty times thinking to let him go. But I was soon relieved by one of our servants, who wrung off the bird’s neck, and I had him next day for dinner, by the queen’s command.
Seeing what had happened, I immediately ran to the poor little bird’s assistance, but, alas! too late, as the cruel animal had torn off one of its wings. Whilst my mother was feelingly lamenting her favourite’s untimely death, and deliberating whether the cat should be given away, the door opened, the culprit escaped, and Captain Elphinstone entered.
The colour and number of the bird’s eggs, the period of their incubation, the materials employed by them for the walls and lining of their nests, were described by him so vividly, and illustrated by such graphic anecdotes, that one of the party remarked that, if George Stephenson had not been the greatest engineer of his day, he might have been one of the greatest naturalists.
Dawn already whitened the east; and up out of the ghastly fog edging the German Empire, silhouetted, monstrous, against the daybreak, soared a Lämmergeyer, beating the livid void with enormous, unclean wings. The orderly heard its scream, shrank, cowering, against the door frame as the huge bird’s ferocious red and yellow eyes blazed level with his.
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