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Updated: June 12, 2025
Let it be late in the afternoon of the Sunday, the swifts still wheeling, the roses still blooming, blue-winged jays slipping in and out of the beech trees. These hazel lanes were once the scene of Puritan marchings to and fro, of Fifth Monarchy men who likened the Seven-hilled City to the Beast; furious men with musket and pike, whose horses' hoofs had defaced the mosaic pavements of cathedral.
Birds that are not attracted by the heath, or the cedar and chestnut, are sure to find some excuse for visiting this miscellaneous growth in the centre. Most of the common birds literally throng in this idle-wild; and I have met here many of the rarer species, such as the great-crested flycatcher, the solitary warbler, the blue-winged swamp warbler, the worm-eating warbler, the fox sparrow, etc.
When I crawled down to the river-side to bathe, I often saw the blue-winged Papilio ulysses, or some other equally rare and beautiful insect; but there was nothing for it but patience, and to return quietly to my bird-skinning, or whatever other work I had indoors.
But the sun is overwhelming, under the meager cover of the bushes. Cheerily, my lad! Have at your Kepler's laws in the company of the blue-winged locusts. You will return home with your problems solved, but with a blistered skin. An overdose of sun in the neck shall be the outcome of grasping the law of the areas. One thing makes up for another.
Yet in two days the Judge was shooting blue-winged teal at the mouth of the Acco-tink, and his entire indifference to his family set Reybold to thinking whether the Virginia husband and father was anything more than a forgetful savage. The boarders, however, made very merry over the absent unknown.
Still higher, the outlines of the topmost crags were drawn hard against the sky, for there was no vapour in the air. Verily, the ground seemed quite alive with brown lizards darting along at my approach and raising little clouds of dust, whilst blue-winged grasshoppers which, perhaps, would be more correctly described as locusts crossed and recrossed the road in one flight.
Though in the few allotted hours these might not sprout, but only quicken in their heart, yet blue-winged wasps made their faith more manifest, and worked with feverish haste to gather pellets of clay and fashion cells. I once saw even the beginning of storage a green spider, which an hour later was swallowed by a passing fish instead of nourishing an infant wasp.
When the blue-winged cricket, basking on the pebbles of some country footpath, grows deliciously intoxicated with the heat of the sun and rubs its great posterior thighs against the roughened edge of its wing-covers; when the green tree-frog swells its throat in the foliage of the bushes, distending it to form a resonant cavity when the rain is imminent, is it calling to its absent mate?
My only clew to the owner of the blue-winged hat had failed me, and all that was left to me was to patrol the Avenue day after day, forever hoping and forever being disappointed. June came. The five-room flat was still unrented.
But with her was I wont to play, And pull her ears, and belabour her rugged sides and grey, And hold her jaws together, while she whimpered, slobbering For the love of my love; and nowise I deemed her a fearsome thing. There she sat as though she were watching, and o'er head a blue-winged jay Shrieked out from the topmost oak-twigs, and a squirrel ran his way Two tree-trunks off.
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