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Updated: June 3, 2025
I set out a little before sunset, when the heat of the day is well over, and the evening begins to feel deliciously cool. All is quiet; there is nothing to be heard but the occasional note of the piping-crow, and the chatter of a passing flock of paroquets. As I ascend the hill, passing an abandoned quartz-mine, even these sounds are absent, and perfect stillness prevails.
As we walked in the filtered sunlight we had a great fright, Polly Ann and I. Shrill, discordant cries suddenly burst from the branches above us, and a flock of strange, green birds flecked with red flew over our heads. Even Tom, intent upon the trail, turned and laughed at Polly Ann as she stood clutching me. "Shucks," said he, "they're only paroquets."
But they were irritable, passionate little creatures, these lovely things, and quarrelled with each other and fought like very wasps! Enormous butterflies, with wings of deep metallic blue, shot past or hovered in the air like gleams of light; and green paroquets swooped from tree to tree and chattered joyfully over their morning meal.
Their thick branches are the resort of cockatoos, parrots and paroquets in brilliant plumage, and perhaps most beautiful of all, because most rare, sparrows, not clothed, like ours, in sombre gray, but rejoicing in vestments of green and gold.
Hundreds of green paroquets with blue heads and red breasts, turtle-doves, wood-pigeons, and other birds enlivened the groves with sound, if not with melody, and the various lakelets and pools were alive with wild ducks and water-hens.
The sky, so far as he could see it, was cloudless, the crisp leaves of a tall palm close at hand rustled in a light breeze like the patter of rain, gayly plumaged paroquets and nonpareils flitted across his line of vision, and the air was filled with the pleasant odor of burning wood, mingled with the fragrance of a cigarette that Dionysio smoked while squatted on his heels before a small fire.
Ten or twenty birds lay in the same nest, and you might find in them, at the one time, eggs just laid, birds recently hatched, and others ready to fly. Sitting and rearing go on concurrently. I procured a tame pair of this lovely breed of paroquets from the Guatos.
"Hundreds of times better than going to a picnic at Bushey Park, uncle," I said. "But you talked of eating the birds we shot. Thrushes would be good, wouldn't they?" "Delicious, Nat, only so very small." "But you wouldn't eat parrots, uncle, lories, and paroquets, and these sort of birds?"
The sun went down with Indian suddenness and shut off the scene of upraised lash and squirming, naked, ash-smeared devil, as a magic-lantern picture; disappears. Only the creature's screams reverberated through the jungle, like a belated echo to the restless paroquets. "He will sleep less easily for a week or two!" hazarded Mahommed Gunga, stepping back toward Cunningham.
Paroquets were chattering happily; rills were trickling down the hillsides; fruit and flower trees perfumed the air, and everything looked bright and beautiful in pleasant accordance with the state of Jarwin's feelings while the two friends wandered away through the woods in dreamy enjoyment of the past and present, and with hopeful anticipations in regard to the future.
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