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Updated: June 3, 2025
A female convict punished. Pernicious effects of the grub-worm. Gardens plundered. A granary erected. Wheat destroyed by paroquets. Number of inhabitants on the island. The interval of fine weather, which gave us an opportunity of examining the state of our provisions, and cleaning the damaged flour, was succeeded by a hurricane that was dreadful beyond description.
The latter was actually torn up by the roots and whirled away, none knew whither. At other times large hailstones, for which the country is noted, have destroyed everything, or tens of thousands of green paroquets have done their destructive work. When a five-months' drought was parching everything, I have heard him reverently pray that God would spare him wheat sufficient to feed his family.
Ten thousand paroquets shrieking passionately, like a hundred knife-grinders at work, is no joke; especially when their melodies are mingled with the discordant cries of herons, and bitterns, and cranes, and the ceaseless buzz and hum of insects, like the bagpipe's drone, and the dismal croaking of boat-bills and frogs, one kind of which latter, by the way, doesn't croak at all, but whistles, ay, better than many a bird!
However, next minute he was forced to admit the fact, for there fell on his ear the sublime strains of Mozart's "Il mio tesoro tanto" from Don Juan. "Well, now," said the geographer to himself, "let the Australian birds be as queer as they may, and even granting the paroquets are the most musical in the world, they can't sing Mozart!"
I was a worshipper of trees at this season, and I remember my shocked and indignant feeling when one day a flock of green paroquets came screaming down and alighted on one of the trees near me. This paroquet never bred in our plantation; they were occasional visitors from their home in an old grove about nine miles away, and their visits were always a great pleasure to us.
We also saw a great variety of small birds of bright plumage, and many paroquets similar to the one, that awoke Peterkin so rudely in the morning.
As to their boats, called canoes, each is hollowed out of the single trunk of a tree and can hold as many as forty men. Their dress of ceremony is a kind of vest made of paroquets' feathers, woven together, and so arranged that the large wing and tail-feathers form a sort of girdle round their loins, which gives them a whimsical and ridiculous appearance."
But the use to which I was ambitious to put my or our conservatory was that of an aviary. I love all pet birds, and one of my sweetest day dreams has been that which possessed me of a large glass room or bower well stocked with canaries, linnets, bullfinches, robins, wrens, Java sparrows, love birds, and paroquets.
There were thousands of valuable articles which might have been saved if there had been less of solicitude displayed for the miserable effigies which are usually exhibited under the appellation of 'wax figures. As it was, a dozen firemen rushed into the apartment where the figures were kept, amid a multitude of crawling snakes, chattering monkeys and escaped paroquets.
We also saw a great variety of small birds of bright plumage, and many paroquets similar to the one that awoke Peterkin so rudely in the morning.
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