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Updated: June 15, 2025
Euphrosyne cast a smile down to the nun, and placed herself against the jalousie, holding the branch upon her head. As she had hoped, two humming-birds returned. After some hesitation, they came for more of their sweet food, and Euphrosyne felt that her hair was blown about on her forehead by the motion of their busy wings.
Would that there were more birds to be seen and heard! But of late years the free Negro, like the French peasant during the first half of this century, has held it to be one of the indefeasible rights of a free man to carry a rusty gun, and to shoot every winged thing. He has been tempted, too, by orders from London shops for gaudy birds humming-birds especially.
"I remember, Lady Mary, first seeing humming-birds when I was about your age, while walking in the garden. It was a bright September morning, and the rail-fences and every dry twig of the brushwood were filled with the webs of the field-spider.
In the pure air and under the serene blue of the sky those matchless hues of blossom and foliage threw a rainbow-coloured garment on either bank of the river; the flamingoes, the parrots and woodpeckers and humming-birds calling to one another and flying among the tree-tops, made the upper air also seem alive and shot with all the colours of the rainbow.
Humming-birds, too, are quite common here, and the robin is always found along the margin of the stream, or out in the shallowest portions of the sod, and sometimes the grouse and mountain quail, with their broods of precious fluffy chickens.
When feeding, it remains a shorter time than usual poised in the air before the flowers, frequently perching, and occasionally darting after small insects flying by. When the orange-trees become fully covered with flowers, the humming-birds appear in vast numbers. Their motions are totally unlike those of other birds.
The Garden of San Marcos, one of many open public squares, forms a wilderness of foliage and flowers, where the oleanders are thirty feet in height, shading lilies, roses, and pansies, with a low-growing species of mignonette as fragrant as violets, our admiration for which was shared by a score of glittering humming-birds.
In one week after they are hatched, the young birds are ready to fly, but they are fed by their parents for nearly another week. Their plumage, however, does not attain its full brilliancy till the succeeding spring. But we must confine ourselves to the humming-birds of the Cordilleras, on the western coast.
The colours are chiefly of a bronze-green, with wings of a purple-brown; while the feet, just appearing below its milk-white ruffs, are yellow. However, I have not time to describe one-half of the humming-birds or others of the feathered tribe which the doctor exhibited. I had often seen them flying about, but had never taken the pains to examine the peculiarities of each.
We had a long wet walk in the forest; the mosses and ferns being kept moist and green by the innumerable little streams of water which abound everywhere. Owing to the thickness of the surrounding jungle, it was impossible to stray from our very narrow path, notwithstanding the attractions of humming-birds, butterflies, and flowers.
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