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But generally the birds used to grumble at the nightingale, and say it was not fair of him to make such a noise of a night. They wanted peace and quietness; and one old greenfinch, who could not sing a bit, and had no ear for music, used to say that the nightingale was as great a nuisance as old Shoutnight, the owl, and that his noises ought to be stopped.
"Ah!" said Judge Shoutnight, "who-oo-oo ere's the prisoner?"
"Hallo! here, Shoutnight; hallo! wake up; anybody at home?" said the magpie, holding his head very much on one side, and peeping with one eye at a time into the snug place where the fuzzy old gentleman used to bring his mice home. "Hallo! here," he continued, throwing in a small lump of mortar, which woke up the owl with a start. "Who-hoo-hoo-hoo?" shouted the master of the house.
Saying which, they pecked and buffeted old Shoutnight to such a degree that he was glad to shuffle off to his hole behind the ivied chimney-stack. All this while the cry kept coming out of the cedar, "Cuckoo! cuckoo!" "It's Dutch," said a greenfinch, looking very knowing. "No, it isn't; he comes from Spain, I know," said the goldfinch. "Chiswick, Chiswick," shouted the sparrow.
"What's that to you, old snail-crusher?" said the blackbird, for he was in rather an ill temper that morning, through having had a fright in the night, and being woke up by old Shoutnight the owl, who had been out mousing and lost his wife, and sat at last in the ivy-tod halloaing and hoo-hooing, till the gardener's wife threw her husband's old boot out of the window at him, when he went flop into the laurel bush, and banged and bounced about, hissing and snapping with his great bill, while his goggle eyes glowed so angrily that the blackbird's good lady popped off her nest in a hurry and broke one of her eggs, and, what was worse, was afraid to go back again till the eggs were nearly cold; and then she was so cross about it, that although the broken egg was only a bad one, she turned round upon Flutethroat, her husband, who had been almost frightened to death, and told him in a pet it was all his fault for not picking out a better place for the nest.
The old owl said it was a rude boy trying to hoot; while the saucy jackdaw said it was nothing to be afraid of, for it was only old Shoutnight with a bad cold. But, last of all, out came the old gardener with a lantern in one hand, a stick in the other, and his red nightcap on, to look round the garden and see what was the matter.
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