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Updated: June 17, 2025
It was late in the afternoon. Emily thought her brother looked thin, but the children rushing round him, and taking possession of him, soon made her forget that, and the unwelcome thought of Laura, for she saw his almost boyish delight in his young guests, and they made him sit down, and closed him in, thrusting up, with tyrannous generosity, cages of young starlings, all for him, and demanding that a room, safe from cats, should immediately be set aside for them.
The inhabitants of the houses on the bridge, having now become thoroughly alarmed, flung bedding, boxes, and articles of furniture, out of their windows into the river. A crowd of boats surrounded the starlings, and the terrified occupants of the structures above descending to them by the staircases in the interior of the piers, embarked with every article they could carry off.
Everybody is forever washing clothes but nobody ever wears it after it is washed. And what has become of all the birds?" For the first puzzle there is no key, but the traveler gets the answer to the other when he passes a meat-dealer's shop in the town and sees spread on the stalls heaps of pitiably small starlings and sparrows and finches exposed for sale.
During those three winter months, when I watched the starlings at work on the field before my hospital window, they appeared to be in a perpetual state of extreme hunger and were always running over the ground, rapidly prodding as they moved, and apparently finding their food almost exclusively on the surface that is to say, on the surface of the soil but under the grass, at its surface roots.
Oh yes, I have often met in the world young men who were absolutely starlings in love and complete dupes of a friendship which women pretended to show them, women who felt themselves obliged to make a diversion and to apply a blister to their husbands as their husbands had previously done to them!
His father had even stuck the old barrier up in the garden, and had nailed at the top a box for the starlings to nest in; every spring a pair of birds built there. And his father himself, how little he had altered!
A tax was levied upon the parishioners to provide these officers with funds, and it then became their duty to pay bounties for the heads and eggs of crows, rooks, starlings, and many other birds. Finally, the church-wardens were ex-officio overseers of the poor. They were to estimate the annual costs and to tax their fellow-townsmen for this purpose.
The further out one went, the more open it was, and there were cherry-trees, plum-trees, wide-spreading old apple-trees, lichened and held up with props, and the pear-trees were so tall that it was incredible that there could be pears on them. This part of the garden was let to the market-women of our town, and it was guarded from thieves and starlings by a peasant an idiot who lived in a hut.
Other birds, with far less assurance and shrill clamour than the lovely starlings, visit the trough regularly and by the score. Two species of honey-eaters are seldom unrepresented.
Of the labor movement and other new things they gossiped as frivolously as so many chattering starlings, who had snapped up the news on the wind. But Pelle went so confidently out into the world, and set his shoulders against it, and then came back home to them.
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