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When consciousness returned, I found myself lying upon some blankets, under a sort of arbour of foliage and flowers. It was broad day; the sun shone brightly, the blossoms smelled sweet, the gay-plumaged hummingbirds were darting and shooting about in the sunbeams like so many animated fragments of a prism.
The little creatures glance about like prismatic rays embodied in the smallest visible forms. After gazing upon these hummingbirds with joy as great as theirs, as they revel like fairies in the profusion of this flowery valley, look upward on the high, grand ridges that close it in. What suddenly starts from the very top of yon cliff, and floats in the air, high, high, above you?
On the one side we have baboons, lions, elephants, buffaloes, and giraffes; on the other spider-monkeys, pumas, tapirs, anteaters, and sloths; while among birds, the hornbills, turacos, orioles, and honeysuckers of Africa contrast strongly with the toucans, macaws, chatterers, and hummingbirds of America.
These various types of shrubbery were as big as trees in the temperate zones; in the damp shade between them, there were clustered actual bushes of moving flowers, hedges of zoophytes in which there grew stony coral striped with twisting furrows, yellowish sea anemone from the genus Caryophylia with translucent tentacles, plus anemone with grassy tufts from the genus Zoantharia; and to complete the illusion, minnows flitted from branch to branch like a swarm of hummingbirds, while there rose underfoot, like a covey of snipe, yellow fish from the genus Lepisocanthus with bristling jaws and sharp scales, flying gurnards, and pinecone fish.
His glances roved here and there, pausing a moment in their flight like hummingbirds, to sip the sweetness from some unusually beautiful cloud or tree or flower, when he suddenly caught sight of a curious equipage flying swiftly down the road at the other side of the field. The spirited horses stopped.
"Well, do as you please," said the Czarover, "but if you are all transformed into hummingbirds or caterpillars, don't blame me for not warning you." They stayed the rest of that day in the City of Herku and were fed at the royal table of the Czarover and given sleeping rooms in his palace.
A friend of birds once planted many sprouts of wild honeysuckle about his porch, and the following summer two pairs of hummingbirds built their nests in near-by apple trees; he transplanted quantities of living woodbine to the garden fences, and when the robins returned in the spring, after having remained late the previous autumn feeding on the succulent bunches of berries, no fewer than ten pairs nested on and about the porch and yard.
Most little Woodpeckers climb up to the hole-edge to be fed; but young Flickers are fed in the same way as little Hummingbirds, the parent swallowing food and when it is softened bringing it back from the crop by pressing on it with the beak." "What is the crop?" asked Dodo.
You could tell from their very names that they would do uncommon things. And as for their more distant relatives, the Hummingbirds and Chimney Swifts, it would take a story apiece as long as this to begin to tell of their strange doings. But it is a nice, likable sort of queerness they all have; so very interesting, too, that we enjoy them the better for it.
Among the blossomed branches there were parrots screaming, and the little hummingbirds, like flying jewels, darting from flower to flower. Up above them the great trees towered, shutting out the sight of the sea, so that a dozen ships might have lain in that place without being observed from the open water.
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