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One of his pals was going to Dover, and he would ask him to take the bird and let it go up by the castle where it would mix with the jackdaws there, and that would be too far away for it to come back. But it did come back, and after that he sent it to Ashford, and then to Canterbury, and I don't know how many other places, but it always came back, and they always seemed very glad to see it back.
Ambrose told the story of the doctor's jackdaw at dinner-time to Miss Grey, Nancy, and David, who were all very much interested. The two latter began at once to recall memories of all the jackdaws who had lived at the Vicarage. "Do you remember the one which flew away in the gale?" said Nancy. "David doesn't, of course.
The sight of it, dropped from heaven, as it seemed, filled him with awe. It was so near, and yet so far. The breeze had fallen; all was still. He could hear the rustle of the tide, and the chuckle of jackdaws. Overhead a raven flapped by with slow-skewing head. Horror of loneliness swept upon the boy. He shrank into his body. The windows of his spirit shut with a bang. Night came down.
Out like magic came the jackdaws from hole and corner snapping, snarling, and barking birdily to join in a hue and cry as they formed a pack to drive away the bucolic intruders who dared to invade the precincts sacred to daws from the beginning of architectural time; and this task over, they returned to sit on corbel, leaden spout, crevice, and ledge, to erect the feathers of their powdered heads and make remarks to one another, till the chimes rang out and the big bell boomed the hour.
Half an hour later he had another cup of tea, for his thirst seemed greater, and after that he went and wandered about the town, finding most rest in the shade of the great ruined Castle Keep, where the jackdaws sailed round, and cawed at him as if they were old friends from Primchilsea who recognised him and called out to their companions that he was below.
The walls, which were crumbling away here and there, and which were covered with dark ivy; the round towers, which harbored jackdaws, owls, and hawks; the Æolian harp, which complained and sighed and wept in the wind; the stones in the castle yard, which were overgrown with grass; the cloisters, in which every footstep re-echoed; the great ancestral portraits which hung on the walls, coated as it were with dark, mysterious veils by the centuries which had passed over them all this recalled to him the legends and fairy tales of his youth, and he involuntarily thought of the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, and of Blue Beard, of the cruel mistress of the Kynast, and that aristocratic tigress of the Carpathians, who obtained the unfading charms of eternal youth by bathing in human blood.
'From his attending flocks of sheep, on the same mission as jackdaws fulfil here which likewise have an ecclesiastical reputation 'A great frequenter of the church. Fearing alike nonsense and ornithology, Lord Ormersfield changed the subject, and Louis subsided, but when the gentlemen came into the drawing-room, Mrs.
Nor even to let himself down a spout, which would have been an old game to him; for once he got up by a spout to the church roof, he said to take jackdaws' eggs, but the policeman said to steal lead; and, when he was seen on high, sat there till the sun got too hot, and came down by another spout, leaving the policemen to go back to the stationhouse and eat their dinners.
'Fairies light On Cassilis Downans dance. The bearer nodded and smiled. "I knew it by instinct," and Leslie began eating them like a tempted child, and stained her pretty lips. "Those old rows on each side of the summer-house where papa first learnt his lessons I wonder if there are jackdaws there still: won't you have some?" "No, thank you. What a memory you have, Miss Bower!"
The endlessly flowing river, the solitude and peace and bliss, and a kind of voluptuous melancholy, and the thrill of rapture, the unfamiliar monotonous town, the autumn cries of the jackdaws in the high sun-lit treetops, and the tender words and smiles and looks, long, soft, piercing to the very in-most soul, and the beauty, beauty in our lives, about us, on all sides it is above words.
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