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Updated: May 17, 2025
A slate-colored junco did a pretty thing in the woods one day of early spring much more pleasing to see than the incident just described. He had rinsed his feathers in a pool of the little stream down in the hollow, and now he was squatting flat on his belly on the ground in a soft bed of brown leaves, preening and primping his plumes with his little white, conical bill.
Idly watching them through glasses, I saw them sleepily preening their sprouting feathers, making ineffectual attempts at pecking one another, or else hunched in silent heron-dream.
Evidently, along with other things, he was taking her to be getting old and uninteresting. He saw her wrinkles, perhaps. She was fading, while he was still preening himself in his elegance and youth. He was still an interested factor in the merry-makings of the world, while she but she did not pursue the thought. She only found the whole situation bitter, and hated him for it thoroughly.
An hour's sailing with wind and stream brought me to the desired spot, where I landed on the sandy beach, when my dog, glad to escape from confinement on board, ran to the top of a high dyke, or wall for preventing floods, some hundred yards distant, and put up hundreds of wild geese which had been preening themselves in the sun on the other side, where they had also found shelter from the cutting wind.
"This is Dot," said the Kangaroo a little anxiously, and rather breathless with the speed she had made. "Just as I had expected!" exclaimed Willy Wagtail, with a jerk of the tail which nearly sent him headlong off the rail. "I should know you anywhere, little Human, though you do look a bit different. You want preening," he added.
Should she betray this artless preening and trimming of her maiden plumage, which, though, like a bird's, an open secret of nature, must nevertheless be kept sacred by an impulse of modest concealment and deceit towards the one for whose sake it all was?
The sixth had only risen upon his elbow: he was deadly pale, and the blood-stained bandage round his head told that he had recently been wounded, and still more recently dressed. I remembered the man who had been shot and had run back among the woods in the great attack, and doubted not that this was he. The parrot sat, preening her plumage, on Long John's shoulder.
The little old reader had quietly disappeared, leaving them a vacant table. "Isn't he weird?" laughed Heywood, as they sat down. "Comes and goes like a ghost." "It is his Chinese wife," declared Chantel, preening his moustache. "He is always ashame to meet the new persons." "Poor old chap," said Heywood. "I know feels himself an outcast and all that. Humph! With us! Quite unnecessary."
The proposition was so sensible that I went off with the gun, and following the course of the river beyond the bluff, I was not long before I heard a familiar noise, and creeping forward in the grey dawn, I was soon crouching behind the low growth by a wide pool of the river, where quite a flock of ducks were disporting themselves, preening their feathers, diving, making the bright drops run over their backs like pearls, and ending by flapping and beating the water heavily with their wings, exactly as I had seen them perform in the pond at home.
They splatter into the shallows, drink daintily, shake out small showers over their perfect coats, and melt away again into the scrub, preening and pranking, with soft contented noises.
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