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"Quack, quack, quack," grinned the ducks; but, the stork pretended not to hear. "You may as well laugh," said the turkey; "for that remark was rather witty, or perhaps it was above you. Ah, ah, is he not clever? He will be a great amusement to us while he remains here." And then he gobbled, and the ducks quacked, "Gobble, gobble; Quack, quack."
More than once we chanced to swoop down on a family of wild ducks, settled in a circle on an open spot among the reeds, but they did not stir; at most one of them would thrust out its neck from under its wing, stare at us, and anxiously poke its beak away again in its fluffy feathers, and another faintly quacked, while its body twitched a little all over.
"Better than grubbing for bugs in the dirty earth, this nice clean cool water," quacked he, and he was as happy as happy could be. The Toyman was looking at him with a smile on his face. "He's just like me," he said at last, and the children, surprised at that, asked all together: "Who's like you?" "That little duck there." "Like you!" Jehosophat shouted. "Why he doesn't look like you at all!"
He ached from head to foot from the intensity of the mood he had passed through. He went over the recent incidents, almost stunned by his experience and then went outside and stood under the stairs, listening. Tree toads were chirping, there were suspicious cracklings in the grass as of bugs stirring. A duck quacked somewhere feebly.
Run under the fence and scratch him off!" "Run under the fence and scratch him off!" quacked the ducks. "Run under the fence and scratch him off!" hissed the geese. "Run under the fence and scratch him off!" gobbled his wife, the old turkey hen.
Ducks quacked, hens cackled, pigeons perched about on the roofs kept up a monotonous murmur; then came the deep undertones of the patient cows, and as you neared the house you could generally hear Mrs Hatchard's voice in her dairy adding its commanding accents to the medley of sounds.
A blue-jay, perched on a bough above, screamed in mocking laughter at the dreamer beneath; an old drake, leading his family in a waddling row to the open stream below the little house, solemnly quacked his protest against such a willful waste of time; and a spotted calf thrust its head through the barn-yard fence to gaze at him in mild reproach.
The pretty black goat and the sheep bleated, the fowls cackled, and the ducks quacked, while the negroes chatted and laughed as they handed and hauled on board fish of all shapes and sizes, bunches of bananas, piles of cocoa-nuts, sacks of potatoes, and many other things, finishing up with a tiny black boy, about three years old, whom I think they would rather have liked to leave behind with us, if we would only have taken him.
Immediately adjacent to the main building and the four smaller structures, constituting the laboratory plant, were grass meadows that stretched away for some considerable distance in all directions, and at its back door, so to speak, ducks paddled around and quacked in a pond undisturbed.
"Come, jump aboard," quacked Commodore Drake, for that was the name of this duck sailor. Mary Louise jumped in and away they went down the river to the deep blue sea. And after a while, maybe a mile, and perhaps a little more, they came to the restless ocean. "Now," said the duck, with a wheezy, breezy quack, "I'll take you to the Hotel Wave Crest."
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