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Updated: June 12, 2025
'Dear madame, where are you going? said the priest in some alarm. 'This is too fatiguing for you. Eleanor took no notice. She, who for days had scarcely dragged one languid foot after another, sped through the heat and over the broken ground like one of the goldfinches in the convent garden. The old priest followed her with difficulty.
Hundreds of starlings were chattering in the fir-trees, and flying round the branches with incessant motion. In the thick hedge which enclosed it there were crowds of greenfinches, goldfinches, chaffinches, yellow-hammers, and sparrows, who never ceased talking.
No, dearest Eleanor, you are mistaken; for, were she twice as giddy and ten times as volatile as she is, your own Flora could never, never forget you, nor the happy hours we have spent together, nor the pretty goldfinches we had in common, nor the little Scotch duets we used to sing together, nor our longings to change them into Italian, nor our disappointment when we did so, nor our laughter at Signor Shrikalini, nor our tears when poor darling Bijou died.
There were nightingales, canaries, goldfinches, linnets, tomtits, parrots, owls, sparrows, doves, ostriches, bustards, peacocks, larks, partridges, and everything else that you can think of. These feathers were all mixed up in such confusion that the birds themselves could not have chosen out their own.
If the goldfinches, and the thrushes, and blackbirds, and robins, and greenfinches, and sparrows, and so on, were so meek as to submit to be excluded, and were content to have no voice in the matter till they were called upon to obey orders, that was their affair. They were a bevy of poor-spirited, mean things. He was not going to be put down like that.
A sharp watch was kept for goldfinches and the evening grosbeak during the day, but neither was seen. This was something of a disappointment. But it was forgotten in the thrill of joy that came late in the afternoon.
"Bless you!" as father would say, every one of them knew her and recognised her as a friend and fellow-comrade, for she would sing to them sometimes like a lark, which always set them all on the twitter; goldfinches, linnets, and bullfinches, of which mother kept a large stock, hopping about their cages trying by every means in their power to attract her notice on her entering the shop and coming near them; while the lemon-crested cockatoo, who was christened `Ally Sloper, on account of his fine flow of language, and a habit he had of ruffling up the feathers round his neck when spoken to, making him look as if he had a particularly high and stiff collar on, would shriek out `Say-rah! which was mother's name, just as if father were shouting for her to come downstairs in a sort of `reef topsails' on a stormy night sort of voice.
I opened the third door, where I found a large volary, paved with marble of several fine colours that were not common. The cage was made of sanders and wood of aloes: it contained a vast number of nightingales, goldfinches, canary birds, larks, and other rare singing-birds which I never heard of; and the vessels that held their seed and water were of the most precious jasper or agate.
Yes, that was the Farmer Boy going away with a clatter over the snow-crust; but who were these coming through the air, with jerky flight, and with a jerky note something like "Twitterty-twit-twitterty-twit-twitterty-twitterty-twitterty-twit"? They flew like goldfinches, and they sounded like goldfinches, both in the twitterty song of their flight and their "Tweeet" as they called one another.
I came to this conclusion from knowing and visiting a colony of goldfinches I mean master jewellers, who are quite civil to each other, will sit at meat and drink together, go to the same place of worship, and generally behave as friends, neighbours, and Christians.
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