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She excused herself for declining to put the circlet for the pendant round her neck, or a glittering ring on her finger. Her remarks were encomiums, not quite so cold as those of a provincial spinster of an ascetic turn at an exhibition of the world's flycatcher gewgaws.
His short, sharp, and wide beak indicated the flycatcher, and his calm dark eyes were surrounded with delicate lines of minute white feathers, a break at each corner just preventing their being perfect rings.
A female, probably the "beloved object," stood demurely on one of the dead top branches of a large tree down in the garden, while her admirer performed fantastic evolutions in the air about her. No flycatcher ever made half the eccentric movements this aerial acrobat indulged in.
The fasciated honey-eater has loudly called "with a voice that seemed the very sound of happiness"; the leaden flycatcher, often silent but seldom still, has twittered and whispered plaintively; the sun-birds are playing gymnastics among the lemon blossoms, and the centre of activity for butterflies is the red-flowered shrub bordering the wavering path.
When the day was favorable, and the wren had gone his way, foraging in silence over the low ground at our back, and an old stump that stood there, and the sitter had settled herself in her nest for another half hour, we could look about at whoever happened to be there. Thus I made further acquaintance with the great-crested flycatcher.
The least flycatcher, the kingbird, the cedar-bird, the goldfinch, the indigo-bird, are all fine nest-builders, each with a style of its own. About the most insecure nest in our trees is that of the little social sparrow, or "chippie." When the sudden summer storms come, making the tree-tops writhe as if in agony, I think of this frail nest amid the tossing branches.
"He usually is one of the last of the Flycatcher family to arrive. I didn't expect to find him yet. I wonder what has brought him up so early." It didn't take Peter long to find Pewee. He just followed the sound of that voice and presently saw Pewee fly out and make the same kind of a little circle as the other members of the family make when they are hunting flies.
In summer he is a flycatcher, but here he searches the bark of forest trees with microscopic scrutiny for the larvae of insects. We all know the lively black-capped chickadees that fly around in flocks throughout the winter. Sometimes their search for food leads them into the heart of towns and cities, where they are as bold and as much at home as the English sparrow.
It would not be safe to risk saying that the scissorstail always takes his bath in this way; but I know this one did. I once saw a kingbird doing the same thing, and so it may be a fashion in flycatcher circles. I am minded, in order to make this monograph more complete, to borrow a couple of paragraphs from Mrs. Bailey's "Handbook of Birds of the Western United States."
"Sergeant, bring your men here." Half an hour later Lieutenant Carteret reported to Commander Arness. "I have brought the prisoner on board, sir. He is a man named Charles Parker, and was sergeant of marines on the Flycatcher?" "Very good, Mr. Carteret What have you done with his wife?" "She refused to leave, sir, and when we brought the man away, went off to the other side of the island."
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