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Then motherly instinct came to the rescue: she refused further aid, removed herself to a distance, built a new nest, after the accredited flycatcher fashion, and it is supposed brought out her brood safely, if rather late. So hard it is in the bird-world, as in the human, to help, and not hurt.
But the story is not yet finished; the worst is to come. For when, indignant at the countryman's ignorance of the bird-world, she told all this in town, there was one very solemn gentleman who said: 'Are you sure that it was not a gull? This went beyond all bounds, thought my lady, and she came and complained bitterly to me.
At the last I could not stay in my bed in the morning, but rushed out before sunrise, remembering how momentous are the early morning hours in the bird-world. But it was noon of the twenty-first day of his life when the first baby flew.
The infant who receives such devoted care is a pretty little creature in dull yellow, and the most persistent cry-baby I know in the bird-world, though several are not far behind him in this accomplishment.
Save the bird-world always abroad early no living thing seemed astir, and the silence that reigned was broken only by the distance-softened bleating of Stanley's pet lamb.
Grouped upon the stage in picturesque attitudes were about forty figures costumed to represent various birds, and in their midst was a charming little maiden, evidently the only human being in this bird-world, and presently it was disclosed to the audience that she was held as a hostage to these bird-beings, until the prince of their enchanted world should be released from bondage in the land of human beings and restored to them.
"Chack! chack! chack! too! too! t-t-t! quawk! quawk!" at the top of somebody's loud resonant voice, as if the whole bird-world had suddenly gone mad. I looked about, expecting to see a general rush to the spot; but, to my surprise, no one seemed to notice it. A catbird on the fence went on with his bewitching song, and a wood thrush in the shrubbery dropped not a note of his heavenly melody.
"I wonder if they're gone," was our anxious thought every morning as we approached; and one day, not seeing either parent, we feared they had made their début without our assistance, in the magical morning hours when so many things take place in the bird-world.
She was less talkative than her spouse, as are most feathered dames a wise arrangement in the bird-world, for what would become of the nest and nestlings, if the home-keepers had as much to say as their mates? She sat calmly on the fence, as I passed, or dressed her plumage on the branch of a tree, uttering no sound except, rarely, the common mewing call. She was a wise little thing, too.
We cannot suppose that every type has been preserved, but we see that our bird-world was virtually created in the early part of the Tertiary Era. With these more or less familiar types were large ostrich-like survivors of the older order. The absence of early Eocene remains prevents us from tracing the lines of our vast and varied bird-kingdom to their Mesozoic beginnings.
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