The beautiful is vanished and returns not.•       •       •       •       •Note.—The foregoing chapter, albeit written so many years ago, is still "up-to-date"—still represents without a shadow of a shade of difference the state of the case. The extermination of our rare birds and "occasional visitors" still goes merrily on in defiance of the law, and the worstoffendersare still received with open arms by the British Ornithologists' Union. Indeed, that Society, from the point of view of many of its members would have noraison d'êtreif membership were denied to the private collector of rare "British killed" birds and their eggs and to the "scientific" ornithologist whose mission is to add several new species annually to the British list. They still dine together and exhibit their specimens to one another. On the last occasion of my attending one of these meetings a member exhibited a small bird "in the flesh"—a bird from some far country which had been shot somewhere on the east coast and was so knocked to pieces by the shot that the ornithologists had great difficulty in identifying it. Although a collector himself he was anxious to dispose of the specimen, but none of his brother collectors would give him a five-pound note for it owing to its condition. It was handed round and examined and discussed by all the authorities present. I stood apart, looking at a group of ornithologists bending over the shatteredspecimen, all talking and arguing, when another member who by chance was not a collector moved to my side and whispered in my ear: "Just like a lot of little children!"Is it not time to say to these "little children" that they must find a new toy—a fresh amusement to fill their vacant hours: that birds—living flying birds—are a part of nature, of this visible world in this island, the dwelling-place of some forty-five or fifty millions of souls; that these millions have a right in the country's wild life too—surely a better one than that of a few hundreds of gentlemen of leisure who have money to hire gamekeepers, bird-stuffers, wild-fowlers, and many others, to break the law for them, and to take the punishment when any is given?Bysayingit will be understood that I mean enacting a law to prohibit private collection. It is surely time. But what prospects are there of such an Act being passed by a Parliament which has spent six years playing with a Plumage Prohibition Bill!Well, just now we have a committee appointed by the Government to consider the whole question of bird protection with a view to fresh legislation. Will this committee recommend the one and only way to put a stop to the continuous destruction of our rarer birds? I don't think so. For such a law would be aimed at those of their own class, at their friends, at themselves.At the end of the chapter I gave an account of an interview I had with a great landowner who happened to be a collector, and who cried out that such a law as the one I suggested would be an unwarrantable interference with the liberty of the subject. Another interview years later was with one who is not only a landowner, the head of a branch of a great family in the land, but a great power in the political world as well, and, finally, (notwonderful to relate) a great "protector of birds." "No,"he said warmly, "I will not for a moment encourage you to hope that any good will come of such a proposal. If any person should bring in such a measure I would do everything in my power to defeat it. I am a collector myself and I am perfectly sure that such an interference with the liberty of the subject would not be tolerated."That, I take it, is or will be the attitude of the committee now considering the subject of our wild bird life and its better protection.CHAPTER XIIIVERT—VERT; OR PARROT GOSSIPI am not an admirer of pet parrots. To me, and I have made the discovery that to many others too, it is a depressing experience, on a first visit to nice people, to find that a parrot is a member of the family. As a rule he is the most important member. When I am compelled to stand in the admiring circle, to look on and to listen while he exhibits his weary accomplishments, it is but lip service that I render: my eyes are turned inward, and a vision of a green forest comes before them resounding with the wild, glad, mad cries of flocks of wild parrots. This is done purposely, and the sound which I mentally hear and the sight of their vari-coloured plumage in the dazzling sunlight are a corrective, and keep me from hating the bird before me because of the imbecility of its owners. In his proper place, which is not in a tin cage in a room of a house, he is to be admired above most birds; and I wish I could be where he is living his wild life; that I could have again a swarm of parrots, angry at my presence,hovering above my head and deafening me with their outrageous screams. But I cannot go to those beautiful distant places—I must be content with an image and a memory of things seen and heard, and with the occasional sight of a bird, or birds, kept by some intelligent person; also with an occasional visit to the Parrot House in Regent's Park. There the uproar, when it is at its greatest, when innumerable discordant voices, shrill and raucous, unite in one voice and one great cry, and persons of weak nerves stop up their ears and fly from such a pandemonium, is highly exhilarating.Of the most interesting captive parrots I have met in recent years I will speak here of two. The first was a St Vincent bird,Chrysotis guildingi, brought home with seven other parrots of various species by Lady Thompson, the wife of the then Administrator of the Island. This is a handsome bird, green, with blue head and yellow tail, and is a member of an American genus numbering over forty species. He received his funny specific name in compliment to a clergyman who was a zealous collector not of men's souls, but of birds' skins. To ornithologists this parrot is interesting on account of its rarity. For the last thirty years it has existed in small numbers; and as it is confined to theisland of St Vincent it is feared that it may become extinct at no distant date. Altogether there are about five hundred species of parrots in the world, or about as many parrots as there are species of birds of all kinds in Europe, from the great bustard, the hooper swan, and golden eagle, to the little bottle-tit whose minute body, stript of its feathers, may be put in a lady's thimble. And of this multitude of parrots the St Vincent Chrysotis, if it still exists, is probably the rarest.The parrot I have spoken of, with his seven travelling companions, arrived in England in December, and a few days later their mistress witnessed a curious thing. On a cold grey morning they were enjoying themselves on their perches in a well-warmed room in London, before a large window, when suddenly they all together emitted a harsh cry of alarm or terror—the sound which they invariably utter on the appearance of a bird of prey in the sky, but at no other time. Looking up quickly she saw that snow in big flakes had begun to fall. It was the birds' first experience of such a phenomenon, but they had seen and had been taught to fear something closely resembling falling flakes—flying feathers to wit. The fear of flying feathers is universal among species that are preyed upon by hawks. Ina majority of cases the birds that exhibit terror and fly into cover or sit closely have never actually seen that winged thunderbolt, the peregrine falcon, strike down a duck or pigeon, sending out a small cloud of feathers; or even a harrier or sparrow-hawk pulling out and scattering the feathers of a bird it has captured, but a tradition exists among them that the sight of flying feathers signifies danger to bird life.When I was in the young barbarian stage, and my playmates were gaucho boys on horseback on the pampas, they taught me to catch partridges in their simple way with a slender cane twenty to twenty-five feet long, a running noose at its tip made from the fine pliant shaft of a rhea's wing feather. The bird was not a real partridge though it looks like it, but was the common or spottedtinamouof the plains,Nothura maculosa, as good a table bird as our partridge. Our method was, when we flushed a bird, to follow its swift straight flight at a gallop, and mark the exact spot where it dropped to earth and vanished in the grass, then to go round the spot examining the ground until thetinamouwas detected in spite of his protective colouring sitting close among the dead and fading grass and herbage. The cane was put out, the circle narrowed until the small noose was exactly over the bird's head, so thatwhen he sprang into the air on being touched by the slender tip of the cane he caught and strangled himself. To make the bird sit tight until the noose was actually over his head, we practised various tricks, and a very common one was, on catching sight of the close-squatting partridge, to start plucking feathers from a previously-killed bird hanging to our belt and scatter them on the wind. Sometimes we were saved the trouble of scattering feathers when we were followed by a pair of big carrion hawks on the look-out for an escaped bird or for any trifle we throw to them to keep them with us. The effect was the same in both cases; the sight of the flying feathers was just as terrifying as that of the big hovering hawks, and caused the partridge to sit close.This way of taking thetinamoumay seem unsportsmanlike. Well, if I were a boy in a wild land again—with my present feelings about bird life, I mean—I should not do it. Nor would I shoot them; for I take it that the gun is the deadliest instrument our cunning brains have devised to destroy birds in spite of their bright instinct of self-preservation, their faculty of flight, and their intelligence. It is a hundred times more effective than the boy-on-horseback's long cane with itsnoose made of an ostrich feather—therefore more unsportsmanlike.To return. The resemblance of falling flakes to flying white feathers does not deceive birds accustomed to the sight of snow: it is very striking, nevertheless, and so generally recognised that most persons in Europe have heard of the old woman plucking her geese in the sky. It is curious to find the subject discussed in Herodotus. In Book IV. he says: "The Scythians say that those lands which are situated in the northernmost parts of their territories are neither visible nor practicable by reason of the feathers that fall continually on all sides; for the earth is so entirely covered, and the air is so full of these feathers, that the sight is altogether obstructed." Further on he says: "Touching the feathers ... my opinion is that perpetual snows fall in those parts, though probably in less quantity during the summer than in winter, and whoever has observed great abundance of snow falling will easily comprehend what I say, for snow is not unlike feathers."Probably the Scythians had but one word to designate both. To go back to the St Vincent parrot. Concerning a bird of that species I have heard, and cannot disbelieve, a remarkable story.During the early years of the last century a gentleman went out from England to look after some landed property in the island, which had come to him by inheritance, and when out there he paid a visit to a friend who had a plantation in the interior. His friend was away when he arrived, and he was conducted by a servant into a large, darkened, cool room; and, tired with his long ride in the hot sun, he soon fell asleep in his chair. Before long a loud noise awoke him, and from certain scrubbing sounds he made out that a couple of negro women were engaged in washing close to him, on the other side of the lowered window blinds, and that they were quarrelling over their task. Of course the poor women did not know that he was there, but he was a man of a sensitive mind and it was a torture to him to have to listen to the torrents of exceedingly bad language they discharged at one another. It made him angry. Presently his friend arrived and welcomed him with a hearty hand-shake and asked him how he liked the place. He answered that it was a very beautiful place, but he wondered how his friend could tolerate those women with their tongues so close to his windows. Women with their tongues! What did he mean? exclaimed the other in great surprise. He meant, he said, those wretched niggerwasherwomen outside the window. His host thereupon threw up the blind and both looked out: no living creature was there except a St Vincent parrotdozingon his perch in the shaded verandah. "Ah, I see, the parrot!" said his friend. And he apologised and explained that some of the niggers had taken advantage of the bird's extraordinary quickness in learning to teach him a lot of improper stuff.Another parrot, which interested me more than the St Vincent bird, was a member of the same numerous genus, a double-fronted amazon,Chrysotis lavalainte, a larger bird, green with face and fore-part of head pure yellow, and some crimson colour in the wings and tail. I came upon it at an inn, the Lamb, at Hindon, a village in the South Wiltshire downs. One could plainly see that it was a very old bird, and, judging from the ragged state of its plumage, that it had long fallen into the period of irregular or imperfect moult—"the sere, the yellow leaf" in the bird's life. It also had the tremor of the very aged—man or bird. But its eyes were still as bright as polished yellow gems and full of the almost uncanny parrot intelligence. The voice, too, was loud and cheerful; its call to its mistress—"Mother, mother!" would ring throughthe whole rambling old house. He talked and laughed heartily and uttered a variety of powerful whistling notes as round and full and modulated as those of any grey parrot. Now, all that would not have attracted me much to the bird if I had not heard its singular history, told to me by its mistress, the landlady. She had had it in her possession fifty years, and its story was as follows:—Her father-in-law, the landlord of the Lamb, had a beloved son who went off to sea and was seen and heard of no more for a space of fourteen years, when one day he turned up in the possession of a sailor's usual fortune, acquired in distant barbarous lands—a parrot in a cage! This he left with his parents, charging them to take the greatest care of it, as it was really a very wonderful bird, as they would soon know if they could only understand its language, and he then began to make ready to set off again, promising his mother to write this time and not to stay away more than five or at most ten years.Meanwhile, his father, who was anxious to keep him, succeeded in bringing about a meeting between him and a girl of his acquaintance, one who, he believed, would make his son the best wife in the world. The young wanderer saw and loved, and as the feeling was returned he soon married and endowedher with all his worldly possessions, which consisted of the parrot and cage. Eventually he succeeded his father as tenant of the Lamb, where he died many years ago; the widow was grey when I first knew her and old like her parrot; and she was like the bird too in her youthful spirit and the brilliance of her eyes.Her young sailor had picked up the bird at Vera Cruz in Mexico. He saw a girl standing in the market place with the parrot on her shoulder. She was talking and singing to the bird, and the bird was talking, whistling, and singing back to her—singing snatches of songs in Spanish. It was a wonderful bird, and he was enchanted and bought it, and brought it all the way back to England and Wiltshire. It was, the girl had told him, just five years old, and as fifty years had gone by it was, when I first knew it, or was supposed to be, fifty-five. In its Wiltshire home it continued to talk and sing in Spanish, and had two favourite songs, which delighted everybody, although no one could understand the words. By and by it took to learning words and sentences in English, and spoke less in Spanish year after year until in about ten to twelve years that language had been completely forgotten. Its memory was not as good as that of Humboldt's celebrated parrot of theMaipures, which had belonged to the Apures tribe before they were exterminated by the Caribs. Their language perished with them, only the long-living parrot went on talking it. This parrot story took the fancy of the public and was re-told in a hundred books, and was made the subject of poems in several countries—one by our own "Pleasures of Hope" Campbell.Nevertheless I thought it would be worth while trying a little Spanish on old Polly of the Lamb, and thought it best to begin by making friends. It was of little use to offer her something to eat. Poll was a person who rather despised sweeties and kickshaws. It had been the custom of the house for half a century to allow Polly to eat what she liked and when she liked, and as she—it was really a he—was of a social disposition she preferred taking her meals with the family and eating the same food. At breakfast she would come to the table and partake of bacon and fried eggs, also toast and butter and jam and marmalade, at dinner it was a cut off the joint with (usually) two vegetables, then pudding or tart with pippins and cheese to follow. Between meals she amused herself with bird seed, but preferred a meaty mutton-bone, which she would hold in one hand or foot and feed on with great satisfaction. It wasnot strange that when I held out food for her she took it as an insult, and when I changed my tactics and offered to scratch her head she lost her temper altogether, and when I persisted in my advances she grew dangerous and succeeded in getting in several nips with her huge beak, which drew blood from my fingers.It was only then, after all my best blandishments had been exhausted, and when our relations were at their worst, that I began talking to her in Spanish, in a sort of caressing falsetto like a "native" girl, calling her "Lorito" instead of Polly, coupled with all the endearing epithets commonly used by the women of the green continent in addressing their green pets. Polly instantly became attentive. She listened and listened, coming down nearer to listen better, the one eye she fixed on me shining like a fiery gem. But she spoke no word, Spanish or English, only from time to time little low inarticulate sounds came from her. It was evident after two or three days that she was powerless to recall the old lore, but to me it also appeared evident that some vague memory of a vanished time had been evoked—that she was conscious of a past and was trying to recall it. At all events the effect of the experiment was that her hostility vanished, and we becamefriends at once. She would come down to me, step on to my hand, climb to my shoulder, and allow me to walk about with her.It saddened me a few months later to receive a letter from her mistress announcing Polly's death, on 2nd December 1909.I have thought since that this bird, instead of being only five years old when bought, was probably aged twenty-five years or more. Naturally, the girl who had been sent into the market-place to dispose of the bird would tell a possible buyer that it was young; the parrots one wants to buy are generally stated to be five years old. However, it may be that the bird grew old before its time on account of its extraordinary dietary. The parrot may have an adaptive stomach, still, one is inclined to think that half a century of fried eggs and bacon, roast pork, boiled beef and carrots, steak and onions, and stewed rabbit must have put a rather heavy strain on its system.Many parrots have lived longer than Polly in captivity, long as her life was; and here it strikes me as an odd circumstance that Polly's specific name was bestowed on the species, the double-fronted amazon, as a compliment to the distinguished French ornithologist, La Valainte, who has himselfrecorded the greatest age to which a captive parrot has been known to attain. This bird was the familiar African grey species. He says that it began to lose its memory at the age of sixty, to moult irregularly at sixty-five, that it became blind at ninety, and died aged ninety-three.We may well believe that if parrots are able to exist for fifty years to a century in the unnatural conditions in which they are kept, caged or chained in houses, over-fed, without using their enormously-developed wing-muscles, the constant exercise of which must be necessary to perfect health and vigour, their life in a state of nature must be twice as long.To return to parrots in general. This bird has perhaps more points of interest for us than any other of the entire class: his long life, unique form, and brilliant colouring, extreme sociability, intelligence beyond that of most birds, and, last, his faculty of imitating human speech more perfectly than the birds of other families.The last is to most persons the parrot's greatest distinction; to me it is his least. I do not find it so wonderful as the imitative faculty of some mocking birds or even of our delightful little marsh-warbler, described in another book. This may be because I have never had the good fortune to meet with ashining example, for we know there is an extraordinary difference in the talking powers of parrots, even in those of the same species—differences as great, in fact, as we find in the reasoning faculty between dog and dog, and in the songs of different birds of the same species. Not once but on several occasions I have heard a song from some common bird which took my breath away with astonishment. I have described in another book certain blackbirds of genius I have encountered. And what a wonderful song that caged canary in a country inn must have had, which tempted the great Lord Peterborough, a man of some shining qualities, to get the bird from its mistress, an old woman who loved it and refused to sell it to him, by means of a dishonest and very mean trick. Denied the bird, he examined it minutely and went on his way. In due time he returned with a canary closely resembling the one he wanted in size, colour, and markings, concealed on his person. He ordered dinner, and when the good woman was gone from the room to prepare it, changed his bird for hers, then, having had his meal, went on his way rejoicing. Still he was curious to learn the effect of his trick, and whether or not she had noticed any difference in her loved bird; so, after a long interval, he came oncemore to the inn, and seeing the bird in its cage in the old place began to speak in praise of its beautiful singing as he had heard it and remembered it so well. She replied sadly that since he listened to and wanted to buy it an unaccountable change had come over her bird. It was silent for a spell, perhaps sick, but when it resumed singing its voice had changed and all the beautiful notes which everyone admired were lost. The great man expressed his regret, and went away chuckling at his deliciously funny joke.The ordinary talking parrot is no more to me than the ordinary or average canary, piping his thin expressionless notes; he is a prodigy I am pleased not to know. On the other hand there are numerous authenticated cases of parrots possessed of really surprising powers, and it was doubtless the mimicking powers of such birds of genius which suggested such fictions as that of the Totá Kuhami in the East; and in Europe, Gresset's lively tale ofVert Vertand the convent nuns.It was perhaps a parrot of this rare kind which played so important a part in the early history of South America. It is nothing but a legend of the Guarani nation, which inhabit Paraguay, nevertheless I do believe that we have here an accountmainly true of an important event in the early history of the race or nation. This parrot is not the impossible bird of the fictitious Totá Kahami order we all know, who not only mimics our speech but knows the meaning of the words he utters. He was nothing but a mimic, exceptionally clever, and the moral of the story is the familiar one that great events may proceed from the most trivial causes, once the passions of men are inflamed.The tradition was related centuries ago to the Jesuit Fathers in Paraguay, and I give it as they tell it, briefly.•       •       •       •       •In the beginning a great canoe came over the waters from the east and was stranded on the shores of Brazil. Out of the canoe came the brothers Tupi and Guarani and their sons and daughters with their husbands and wives and their children and children's children.Tupi was the leader, and being the eldest was called the father, and Tupi said to his brother: Behold, this great land with all its rivers and forests, abounding in fish and birds and beasts and fruit, is ours, for there are no other men dwelling in it; but we are few in number, let us therefore continue to live together with our children in one village.Guarani consented, and for many years they lived together in peace and amity like one family, until at last there came a quarrel to divide them. And it was all about a parrot that could talk and laugh and sing just like a man. A woman first found it in the forest, and not wishing to burden herself with the rearing of it she gave it to another woman. So well did it learn to talk from its new mistress that everybody admired it and it grew to be the talk of the village.Then the woman who had found and brought it, seeing how much it was admired and talked about, went and claimed it as her own. The other refused to give it up, saying that she had reared it and had taught it all it knew, and by doing so had become its rightful owner.Now, no person could say which was in the right, and the dispute was not ended and tongues continued wagging until the husbands of the two women became engaged in the quarrel. And then brothers and sisters and cousins were drawn into it, until the whole village was full of bitterness and strife, all because of the parrot, and men of the same blood for the first time raised weapons against one another. And some were wounded and others killed in open fight, and some were treacherously slain when hunting in the forest.Now when things had come to this pass Tupi the Father, called his brother to him and said: O brother Guarani, this is a day of grief to us who had looked to the spending of our remaining years together with all our children at this place where we have lived so long. Now this can no longer be on account of the great quarrel about a parrot, and the shedding of blood; for only by separating our twofamiliescan we save them from destroying one another. Come then, let us divide them and lead them away in opposite directions, so that when we settle again they may be far apart. Guarani consented, and he also said that Tupi was the elder and their head, and was called the Father, and it was therefore in his right to remain in possession of the village and of all that land and to end his days in it. He, on his part, would call his people together and lead them to a land so distant that the two families would never see nor hear of each other again, and there would be no more bitter words and strife between them.Then the two old brothers bade each other an eternal farewell, and Guarani led his people south a great distance and travelled many moons until he came to the River Paraguay, and settled there; and his people still dwell there and are called by his name to this day.Only, I beg to add, they do not call their nation by that word, as the Spanish colonists first spelt it in their carelessness, and as they pronounce it. Heaven knows howwepronounce it! They, the Guarani people, call themselves Wä-rä-nä-eé, in a soft musical voice. Also they call their river, which we spell Paraguay, and pronounce I don't know how, Pä-rä-wä-eé.CHAPTER XIVSOMETHING PRETTY IN A GLASS CASEIt was said by a Norfolk naturalist more than three-quarters of a century ago, that the desire to possess "something pretty in a glass case" caused the killing of very many birds, especially of such as were rare and beautiful, which if allowed to exist in our country would maintain the species and be a constant source of pleasure to all who beheld them. For who, walking by a riverside, does not experience a thrill of delight at the sudden appearance in the field of vision of that living jewel, the shining blue kingfisher! This is one of the favourites of all who desire to have something pretty in a glass case in the cottage parlour in room of the long-vanished pyramid of wax flowers and fruit. It is, however, not only the common people, the cottager and the village publican who desire to possess such ornaments. You see them also in baronial halls. Many a time on visiting a great house the first thing the owner has drawn my attention to has been his stuffed birds in a glass case: but in the great houses the peregrine,and hobby, and goshawk, and buzzard and harrier are more prized than the kingfisher and other pretty little birds.The Philistine we know is everywhere and is of all classes.It is to me a cause of astonishment that these mournful mementoes should be regarded as they appear to be, as objects pleasing to the eye, like pictures and statues, tapestries, and other decorative works of art. The sight of a stuffed bird in a house is revolting to me; it outrages our sense of fitness, and is as detestable as stuffed birds and wings, tails and heads, and beaks of murdered and mutilated birds on women's headgear. "Properly speaking," said St George Mivart in his greatest work, "there is no such thing as a dead bird." The life is the bird, and when that has gone out what remains is the case. These dead empty cases are as much to me as to any naturalist, and I can examine the specimens in a museum cabinet with interest. But the mental attitude is changed at the sight of these same dead empty cases set up in imitation of the living creature; and the more cleverly the stuffer has done his work the more detestable is the result.It may be that some vague notion of a faint remnant of life lingering in the life-like specimen withglass eyes, is the cause of my hatred of the feathered ornament in a glass case. At all events I have had one experience, to be related here, which has almost made me believe that the idea of a sort of post-mortem life in the stuffed bird is not wholly fanciful. I will call it:A DIALOGUE OF THE DEAD (AND STUFFED)Ever since I came the wind has been blowing a gale on this furthermost, lonely, melancholy coast, as if I had got not only to the Land's End, but to the end of the world itself, to the confines of Old Chaos his kingdom, a region where the elements are in everlasting conflict. Two or three times during the afternoon I have resolutely put on my cap and water-proof and gone out to face it, only to be quickly driven in again by the bitter furious blast. Yet it was almost as bad indoors to have to sit and listen by the hour to its ravings. From time to time I get up and look through the window-pane at the few cold grey naked cottages and empty bleak fields, divided by naked grey stone fences, and, beyond the fields, the foam-flecked, colder, greyer, more desolate ocean. Would it be better, I wonder, to fight my way down to those wave-loosened masses of graniteby the sea, where I would hear the roar and thunder of the surf instead of this perpetual insane howling and screaming of the wind round the house? I turn from the window with a shiver; a splash of rain hurled against it has blotted the landscape out; I go back once more to my comfortable easy-chair by the fire. Patience! Patience! By and by, I say to myself—I say it many times over—daylight will be gone; then the lamp will be brought in, the curtains drawn, and tea will follow, with buttered toast and other good things. Then the solacing pipe, and thoughts and memories and some pleasant waking drawn to while away the time.What shall this dream be? Ah, what but the best of all possible dreams on such a day as this—a dream of spring! Somewhere in the sweet west country I shall stand in a wood where beeches grow; and it will be April, near the end of the month, before the leaves are large enough to hide the blue sky and the floating white clouds so far above their tops. Perhaps I shall sit down on one of the huge root-branches, "coiled like a grey old snake," so as to gaze at ease before me at the cloud of purple-red boughs, and interlacing twigs, sprinkled over with golden buds and silky opening leaves of a fresh brilliant green that has no match on the earth or sea, nor under theearth in the emerald mines. I shall watch the love-flight of the cushat above the wood, mounting higher and higher, then gliding down on motionless dove-coloured wings; and I shall listen to the wood wren, ever wandering and singing in the tree-tops—singing that same insistent, passionate—passionless strain to which one could listen for ever.I shall ask for no other song, but there will be other creatures there. Down the tall grey trunk of a beech tree before me a squirrel will slip—down, down nearly to the mossy roots, then pause and remain so motionless as to seem like a squirrel-shaped patch of bright chestnut-red moss or lichen or alga on the grey bark. And on the next tree, but a little distance off, I shall presently catch sight of another listener and watcher—a green woodpecker clinging vertically against the trunk, so still as to look like a bird figure carved in wood and painted green and gold and crimson.Just when I had got so far with the thought of what my dream was to be, I raised my eyes from the fire and allowed them to rest attentively for the first time on a collection of ornaments crowded together in a niche in the wall at the side of the fireplace. The ornamental objects one sees in a cottage are as a rule offensive to me, and I have acquired the habitof not seeing them; now I was compelled to look at these. There were photographs, little china vases and cups with boys or cupids, and things of that kind; these I did not regard; my whole attention was directed to a pair of glass-fronted cases and the living creatures in them. They were not really alive, but dead and stuffed and set up in life-like attitudes, and one was a squirrel, the other a green woodpecker. The squirrel with his back to his neighbour sat up on his mossy wood, his bushy tail thrown along his back, his two little hands grasping a hazel-nut, which he was in the act of conveying to his mouth. The green woodpecker was placed vertically against his branch, his side towards his neighbour, his head turned partly round so that he looked directly at him with one eye. That wide-open white glass eye and the whole attitude of the bird, with his wings half open and beak raised, gave him a wonderfully alert look, so that after regarding him fixedly for some time I began to imagine that, despite the old dead dusty look of the feathers, there was something of life still remaining in him and that he really was watching his neighbour with the nut very intently.Why, of course he was alive—alive and speaking to the squirrel! I could hear him distinctly. Thewind outside was madly beating against the house and trying to force its way through the window, and was making a hundred strange noises—little sharp shrill broken sounds that mixed with and filled the pauses between the wailing and shrieking gusts, and somehow the woodpecker was catching these small sounds in his beak and turning them into words."Hullo!" he said. "Who are you and what are you doing there?""I'm a squirrel," responded the other. "I've said so over and over again, but you will go on worrying me! My only wish is that I could bring my tail just a little more to the right so as to hide my head and paws altogether from you.""But you can't. Hullo! squirrel, what are you doing there? You forgot to tell me that.""I'm eating a nut, confound you! You know it; I've told you ten thousand times. I can't ever get it up quite close enough to bite it and I haven't tasted one for seventeen years. One forgets what a thing tastes like.""I know. I've been fasting just as long myself. Never an ant's egg! Hullo! Have you got it up? How does it taste?""Taste! You fool! If I could only move I wouldn't mind the nut; I'd go for you like a shot,and if I could get at you I'd tear you to pieces. I hate you!""Why do you hate me, squirrel?""More questions! Because you're green and yellow like the woods where I lived. There were beeches and oaks. And because your head is crimson red like the agarics I used to find in the woods in autumn. I used to eat them for fun just because they said they were poisonous and it would kill you to eat them.""And that's what you died of? Hullo! Why don't you answer me? Where did you find red agarics?"I've told you, I've told you, I've told you, in Treve woods where I lived, very far from here on the other side of Lostwithiel.""Treve woods, between the hills away beyond Lostwithiel! Why, squirrel, that's where I lived.""So I've heard; you have said it every day and every night these seventeen years. I hate you.""Hullo! Why do you hate me?""I always disliked woodpeckers. I remember a pair that made a hole in a beech near the tree my drey was in. I played those two yafflers with their laugh laugh laugh some good tricks, and the best of all was when their young began to come out. Onemorning when the old birds were away I hid myself in the fork above the hole and waited till they crept out and up close to me, when I suddenly burst out upon them, chattering and flourishing my tail, and they were so terrified they actually lost their hold on the bark and tumbled right down to the ground. How I enjoyed it!""You malicious little red beast! You chattering little red devil! They were my young ones, and I remember what a fright we were in when we came back and saw what had happened. It was lucky we didn't lose one! I shall never speak to you again. There you may sit trying to eat your nut for another seventeen years, and for a hundred years if this horrible life is going to last so long, but you'll never get another word from me.""I thought that would touch you, woodpecker! Ha, ha, ha—who's the yaffler now? What a relief; at last I shall be left to eat my nut in peace and quiet, here in this glass case where they put me.""Why did they put us here?""You are speaking to me! Are the hundred years over so soon?""There's no one else—what am I to do? Answer me, why did they put us here? Answer me, little red wretch! I don't mind now what you did—theywere not hurt after all. You didn't know what you were doing—you had no young ones of your own.""Hadn't I indeed! My little ones were there close by in the drey.""And when they were out of the drey did you teach them to run about in the tree, and jump from one branch to another, and pass from tree to tree?""I never saw them leave the drey—I was shot.""Where was that, squirrel?""In the Treve Woods where the big beeches are, beyond Lostwithiel.""Never! Why, that's just where I lived and was shot, too. Did it hurt you, squirrel?""I don't know. I saw a flash and remembered no more until I found myself dead in the man's pocket pressed against some wet soft thing. Did it hurt you?""Yes, very much. I fell when he fired and tried to get away, but he chased and caught me and the blood ran out on to his hand. He wiped it off on his coat, then squeezed my sides with his finger and thumb until I was dead, then put me in his pocket. There was some dead warm soft thing in it."Here there was a break in the talk owing to a momentary lull in the wind. I listened intently, but the shrieking and wailing noises without hadceased and with them the sharp little voices had died away. Then suddenly the wind rose and shrieked again and the talk recommenced."Hullo!" said the woodpecker. "Do you see a man sitting by the fire looking at us? He has been staring at us that way all the evening.""What of it! Everyone who comes into this room and sits by the fire does the same. It's nothing new.""It is—it is! Listen to me, squirrel. He looks as if he could hear and understand us. That's new, isn't it? And he has a strange look in his eyes. Do you know, I think he is going mad.""I don't mind, woodpecker. I shouldn't care if he were to run out on to the rocks at the Land's End and cast himself into the sea.""Nor should I. But just think, if before rashing out to put an end to himself he should, in his raving madness, snatch down our cases from the niche and crush them into the grate with his heel!""What do you mean, woodpecker? Could such a thing happen?""Yes, if he really is insane, and if he is listening to us, and we are making him worse.""If I could believe such a thing! I should cease to hate you, woodpecker. No, no, I can't believe it!""Just think, old neighbour, to have it end at last! Burnt up to ashes and smoke—feathers and hair, glass eyes, cottonwool stuffing and all!""Never again to hear that everlasting Hullo! To hate you and hate you and tell you a thousand thousand times, only to begin it all over again!""To fly up away in the smoke, out out out in the wind and rain!""The rain! the rain!""The rain from the south-west that made me laugh my loudest! Raining all day, wetting my green feathers, wetting every green leaf in the woods beyond Lostwithiel. Raining until all the stony gullies were filled to overflowing, and the water ran and gurgled and roared until the whole wood was filled with the sound.""No, no, woodpecker, I can't, I can't believe it!""It's true! It's true! Don't you see it coming, squirrel? Look at him! Look at him! Now, now! At last! At last! At last!"Suddenly their sharp agitated voices fell to a broken whispering and died into silence. For the wind had lulled again. Looking closely at them I thought I could see a new expression in their immovable glass eyes. It frightened me, I began to be frightened at myself; for it now seemed to me thatI really was becoming insane, and I was suddenly seized with a fierce desire to snatch the cases down and crush them into the fire with my heel. To save myself from such a mad act I jumped up, and picking up my candle, hurried upstairs to my bedroom. No sooner did I reach it than the wind was up again, wailing and shrieking louder than ever, and between the gusts there were the murmurings and strange small noises of the wind in the roof, and once more I began to catch the sound of their renewed talk. "Gone! gone!" they said or seemed to say. "Our last hope! What shall we do, what shall we do? Years! Years! Years!" Then by and by the tone changed, and there were question and answer. "When was that, squirrel?" I heard; and then a furious quarrel with curses from the squirrel, and "hullos" and renewed questions from the woodpecker, and memories of their life and death in Treve Wood, beyond Lostwithiel.What wonder that, when hours later I fell asleep, I had the most distressing and maddest dreams imaginable!One dream was that when men die and go to hell, they are sent in large baskets-full to the taxidermists of the establishment, who are highly proficient in the art, and set them up in the most perfectlife-like attitudes, with wideawake glass eyes, blue or dark, in their sockets, their hair varnished to preserve its natural colour and glossy appearance. They are placed separately in glass cases to keep them from the dust, and the cases are set up in pairs in niches in the walls of the palace of hell. The lord of the place takes great pride in these objects; one of his favourite amusements is to sit in his easy-chair in front of a niche to listen by the hour to the endless discussions going on between the two specimens, in which each expresses his virulent but impotent hatred of the other, damning his glass eyes; at the same time relating his own happy life and adventures in the upper sunlit world, how important a person he was in his own parish of borough, and what a gorgeous time he was having when he was unfortunately nabbed by one of the collectors or gamekeepers in his lordship's service.
The beautiful is vanished and returns not.
•       •       •       •       •
Note.—The foregoing chapter, albeit written so many years ago, is still "up-to-date"—still represents without a shadow of a shade of difference the state of the case. The extermination of our rare birds and "occasional visitors" still goes merrily on in defiance of the law, and the worstoffendersare still received with open arms by the British Ornithologists' Union. Indeed, that Society, from the point of view of many of its members would have noraison d'êtreif membership were denied to the private collector of rare "British killed" birds and their eggs and to the "scientific" ornithologist whose mission is to add several new species annually to the British list. They still dine together and exhibit their specimens to one another. On the last occasion of my attending one of these meetings a member exhibited a small bird "in the flesh"—a bird from some far country which had been shot somewhere on the east coast and was so knocked to pieces by the shot that the ornithologists had great difficulty in identifying it. Although a collector himself he was anxious to dispose of the specimen, but none of his brother collectors would give him a five-pound note for it owing to its condition. It was handed round and examined and discussed by all the authorities present. I stood apart, looking at a group of ornithologists bending over the shatteredspecimen, all talking and arguing, when another member who by chance was not a collector moved to my side and whispered in my ear: "Just like a lot of little children!"Is it not time to say to these "little children" that they must find a new toy—a fresh amusement to fill their vacant hours: that birds—living flying birds—are a part of nature, of this visible world in this island, the dwelling-place of some forty-five or fifty millions of souls; that these millions have a right in the country's wild life too—surely a better one than that of a few hundreds of gentlemen of leisure who have money to hire gamekeepers, bird-stuffers, wild-fowlers, and many others, to break the law for them, and to take the punishment when any is given?Bysayingit will be understood that I mean enacting a law to prohibit private collection. It is surely time. But what prospects are there of such an Act being passed by a Parliament which has spent six years playing with a Plumage Prohibition Bill!Well, just now we have a committee appointed by the Government to consider the whole question of bird protection with a view to fresh legislation. Will this committee recommend the one and only way to put a stop to the continuous destruction of our rarer birds? I don't think so. For such a law would be aimed at those of their own class, at their friends, at themselves.At the end of the chapter I gave an account of an interview I had with a great landowner who happened to be a collector, and who cried out that such a law as the one I suggested would be an unwarrantable interference with the liberty of the subject. Another interview years later was with one who is not only a landowner, the head of a branch of a great family in the land, but a great power in the political world as well, and, finally, (notwonderful to relate) a great "protector of birds." "No,"he said warmly, "I will not for a moment encourage you to hope that any good will come of such a proposal. If any person should bring in such a measure I would do everything in my power to defeat it. I am a collector myself and I am perfectly sure that such an interference with the liberty of the subject would not be tolerated."That, I take it, is or will be the attitude of the committee now considering the subject of our wild bird life and its better protection.
Note.—The foregoing chapter, albeit written so many years ago, is still "up-to-date"—still represents without a shadow of a shade of difference the state of the case. The extermination of our rare birds and "occasional visitors" still goes merrily on in defiance of the law, and the worstoffendersare still received with open arms by the British Ornithologists' Union. Indeed, that Society, from the point of view of many of its members would have noraison d'êtreif membership were denied to the private collector of rare "British killed" birds and their eggs and to the "scientific" ornithologist whose mission is to add several new species annually to the British list. They still dine together and exhibit their specimens to one another. On the last occasion of my attending one of these meetings a member exhibited a small bird "in the flesh"—a bird from some far country which had been shot somewhere on the east coast and was so knocked to pieces by the shot that the ornithologists had great difficulty in identifying it. Although a collector himself he was anxious to dispose of the specimen, but none of his brother collectors would give him a five-pound note for it owing to its condition. It was handed round and examined and discussed by all the authorities present. I stood apart, looking at a group of ornithologists bending over the shatteredspecimen, all talking and arguing, when another member who by chance was not a collector moved to my side and whispered in my ear: "Just like a lot of little children!"
Is it not time to say to these "little children" that they must find a new toy—a fresh amusement to fill their vacant hours: that birds—living flying birds—are a part of nature, of this visible world in this island, the dwelling-place of some forty-five or fifty millions of souls; that these millions have a right in the country's wild life too—surely a better one than that of a few hundreds of gentlemen of leisure who have money to hire gamekeepers, bird-stuffers, wild-fowlers, and many others, to break the law for them, and to take the punishment when any is given?
Bysayingit will be understood that I mean enacting a law to prohibit private collection. It is surely time. But what prospects are there of such an Act being passed by a Parliament which has spent six years playing with a Plumage Prohibition Bill!
Well, just now we have a committee appointed by the Government to consider the whole question of bird protection with a view to fresh legislation. Will this committee recommend the one and only way to put a stop to the continuous destruction of our rarer birds? I don't think so. For such a law would be aimed at those of their own class, at their friends, at themselves.
At the end of the chapter I gave an account of an interview I had with a great landowner who happened to be a collector, and who cried out that such a law as the one I suggested would be an unwarrantable interference with the liberty of the subject. Another interview years later was with one who is not only a landowner, the head of a branch of a great family in the land, but a great power in the political world as well, and, finally, (notwonderful to relate) a great "protector of birds." "No,"he said warmly, "I will not for a moment encourage you to hope that any good will come of such a proposal. If any person should bring in such a measure I would do everything in my power to defeat it. I am a collector myself and I am perfectly sure that such an interference with the liberty of the subject would not be tolerated."
That, I take it, is or will be the attitude of the committee now considering the subject of our wild bird life and its better protection.
CHAPTER XIII
VERT—VERT; OR PARROT GOSSIP
I am not an admirer of pet parrots. To me, and I have made the discovery that to many others too, it is a depressing experience, on a first visit to nice people, to find that a parrot is a member of the family. As a rule he is the most important member. When I am compelled to stand in the admiring circle, to look on and to listen while he exhibits his weary accomplishments, it is but lip service that I render: my eyes are turned inward, and a vision of a green forest comes before them resounding with the wild, glad, mad cries of flocks of wild parrots. This is done purposely, and the sound which I mentally hear and the sight of their vari-coloured plumage in the dazzling sunlight are a corrective, and keep me from hating the bird before me because of the imbecility of its owners. In his proper place, which is not in a tin cage in a room of a house, he is to be admired above most birds; and I wish I could be where he is living his wild life; that I could have again a swarm of parrots, angry at my presence,hovering above my head and deafening me with their outrageous screams. But I cannot go to those beautiful distant places—I must be content with an image and a memory of things seen and heard, and with the occasional sight of a bird, or birds, kept by some intelligent person; also with an occasional visit to the Parrot House in Regent's Park. There the uproar, when it is at its greatest, when innumerable discordant voices, shrill and raucous, unite in one voice and one great cry, and persons of weak nerves stop up their ears and fly from such a pandemonium, is highly exhilarating.
Of the most interesting captive parrots I have met in recent years I will speak here of two. The first was a St Vincent bird,Chrysotis guildingi, brought home with seven other parrots of various species by Lady Thompson, the wife of the then Administrator of the Island. This is a handsome bird, green, with blue head and yellow tail, and is a member of an American genus numbering over forty species. He received his funny specific name in compliment to a clergyman who was a zealous collector not of men's souls, but of birds' skins. To ornithologists this parrot is interesting on account of its rarity. For the last thirty years it has existed in small numbers; and as it is confined to theisland of St Vincent it is feared that it may become extinct at no distant date. Altogether there are about five hundred species of parrots in the world, or about as many parrots as there are species of birds of all kinds in Europe, from the great bustard, the hooper swan, and golden eagle, to the little bottle-tit whose minute body, stript of its feathers, may be put in a lady's thimble. And of this multitude of parrots the St Vincent Chrysotis, if it still exists, is probably the rarest.
The parrot I have spoken of, with his seven travelling companions, arrived in England in December, and a few days later their mistress witnessed a curious thing. On a cold grey morning they were enjoying themselves on their perches in a well-warmed room in London, before a large window, when suddenly they all together emitted a harsh cry of alarm or terror—the sound which they invariably utter on the appearance of a bird of prey in the sky, but at no other time. Looking up quickly she saw that snow in big flakes had begun to fall. It was the birds' first experience of such a phenomenon, but they had seen and had been taught to fear something closely resembling falling flakes—flying feathers to wit. The fear of flying feathers is universal among species that are preyed upon by hawks. Ina majority of cases the birds that exhibit terror and fly into cover or sit closely have never actually seen that winged thunderbolt, the peregrine falcon, strike down a duck or pigeon, sending out a small cloud of feathers; or even a harrier or sparrow-hawk pulling out and scattering the feathers of a bird it has captured, but a tradition exists among them that the sight of flying feathers signifies danger to bird life.
When I was in the young barbarian stage, and my playmates were gaucho boys on horseback on the pampas, they taught me to catch partridges in their simple way with a slender cane twenty to twenty-five feet long, a running noose at its tip made from the fine pliant shaft of a rhea's wing feather. The bird was not a real partridge though it looks like it, but was the common or spottedtinamouof the plains,Nothura maculosa, as good a table bird as our partridge. Our method was, when we flushed a bird, to follow its swift straight flight at a gallop, and mark the exact spot where it dropped to earth and vanished in the grass, then to go round the spot examining the ground until thetinamouwas detected in spite of his protective colouring sitting close among the dead and fading grass and herbage. The cane was put out, the circle narrowed until the small noose was exactly over the bird's head, so thatwhen he sprang into the air on being touched by the slender tip of the cane he caught and strangled himself. To make the bird sit tight until the noose was actually over his head, we practised various tricks, and a very common one was, on catching sight of the close-squatting partridge, to start plucking feathers from a previously-killed bird hanging to our belt and scatter them on the wind. Sometimes we were saved the trouble of scattering feathers when we were followed by a pair of big carrion hawks on the look-out for an escaped bird or for any trifle we throw to them to keep them with us. The effect was the same in both cases; the sight of the flying feathers was just as terrifying as that of the big hovering hawks, and caused the partridge to sit close.
This way of taking thetinamoumay seem unsportsmanlike. Well, if I were a boy in a wild land again—with my present feelings about bird life, I mean—I should not do it. Nor would I shoot them; for I take it that the gun is the deadliest instrument our cunning brains have devised to destroy birds in spite of their bright instinct of self-preservation, their faculty of flight, and their intelligence. It is a hundred times more effective than the boy-on-horseback's long cane with itsnoose made of an ostrich feather—therefore more unsportsmanlike.
To return. The resemblance of falling flakes to flying white feathers does not deceive birds accustomed to the sight of snow: it is very striking, nevertheless, and so generally recognised that most persons in Europe have heard of the old woman plucking her geese in the sky. It is curious to find the subject discussed in Herodotus. In Book IV. he says: "The Scythians say that those lands which are situated in the northernmost parts of their territories are neither visible nor practicable by reason of the feathers that fall continually on all sides; for the earth is so entirely covered, and the air is so full of these feathers, that the sight is altogether obstructed." Further on he says: "Touching the feathers ... my opinion is that perpetual snows fall in those parts, though probably in less quantity during the summer than in winter, and whoever has observed great abundance of snow falling will easily comprehend what I say, for snow is not unlike feathers."
Probably the Scythians had but one word to designate both. To go back to the St Vincent parrot. Concerning a bird of that species I have heard, and cannot disbelieve, a remarkable story.During the early years of the last century a gentleman went out from England to look after some landed property in the island, which had come to him by inheritance, and when out there he paid a visit to a friend who had a plantation in the interior. His friend was away when he arrived, and he was conducted by a servant into a large, darkened, cool room; and, tired with his long ride in the hot sun, he soon fell asleep in his chair. Before long a loud noise awoke him, and from certain scrubbing sounds he made out that a couple of negro women were engaged in washing close to him, on the other side of the lowered window blinds, and that they were quarrelling over their task. Of course the poor women did not know that he was there, but he was a man of a sensitive mind and it was a torture to him to have to listen to the torrents of exceedingly bad language they discharged at one another. It made him angry. Presently his friend arrived and welcomed him with a hearty hand-shake and asked him how he liked the place. He answered that it was a very beautiful place, but he wondered how his friend could tolerate those women with their tongues so close to his windows. Women with their tongues! What did he mean? exclaimed the other in great surprise. He meant, he said, those wretched niggerwasherwomen outside the window. His host thereupon threw up the blind and both looked out: no living creature was there except a St Vincent parrotdozingon his perch in the shaded verandah. "Ah, I see, the parrot!" said his friend. And he apologised and explained that some of the niggers had taken advantage of the bird's extraordinary quickness in learning to teach him a lot of improper stuff.
Another parrot, which interested me more than the St Vincent bird, was a member of the same numerous genus, a double-fronted amazon,Chrysotis lavalainte, a larger bird, green with face and fore-part of head pure yellow, and some crimson colour in the wings and tail. I came upon it at an inn, the Lamb, at Hindon, a village in the South Wiltshire downs. One could plainly see that it was a very old bird, and, judging from the ragged state of its plumage, that it had long fallen into the period of irregular or imperfect moult—"the sere, the yellow leaf" in the bird's life. It also had the tremor of the very aged—man or bird. But its eyes were still as bright as polished yellow gems and full of the almost uncanny parrot intelligence. The voice, too, was loud and cheerful; its call to its mistress—"Mother, mother!" would ring throughthe whole rambling old house. He talked and laughed heartily and uttered a variety of powerful whistling notes as round and full and modulated as those of any grey parrot. Now, all that would not have attracted me much to the bird if I had not heard its singular history, told to me by its mistress, the landlady. She had had it in her possession fifty years, and its story was as follows:—
Her father-in-law, the landlord of the Lamb, had a beloved son who went off to sea and was seen and heard of no more for a space of fourteen years, when one day he turned up in the possession of a sailor's usual fortune, acquired in distant barbarous lands—a parrot in a cage! This he left with his parents, charging them to take the greatest care of it, as it was really a very wonderful bird, as they would soon know if they could only understand its language, and he then began to make ready to set off again, promising his mother to write this time and not to stay away more than five or at most ten years.
Meanwhile, his father, who was anxious to keep him, succeeded in bringing about a meeting between him and a girl of his acquaintance, one who, he believed, would make his son the best wife in the world. The young wanderer saw and loved, and as the feeling was returned he soon married and endowedher with all his worldly possessions, which consisted of the parrot and cage. Eventually he succeeded his father as tenant of the Lamb, where he died many years ago; the widow was grey when I first knew her and old like her parrot; and she was like the bird too in her youthful spirit and the brilliance of her eyes.
Her young sailor had picked up the bird at Vera Cruz in Mexico. He saw a girl standing in the market place with the parrot on her shoulder. She was talking and singing to the bird, and the bird was talking, whistling, and singing back to her—singing snatches of songs in Spanish. It was a wonderful bird, and he was enchanted and bought it, and brought it all the way back to England and Wiltshire. It was, the girl had told him, just five years old, and as fifty years had gone by it was, when I first knew it, or was supposed to be, fifty-five. In its Wiltshire home it continued to talk and sing in Spanish, and had two favourite songs, which delighted everybody, although no one could understand the words. By and by it took to learning words and sentences in English, and spoke less in Spanish year after year until in about ten to twelve years that language had been completely forgotten. Its memory was not as good as that of Humboldt's celebrated parrot of theMaipures, which had belonged to the Apures tribe before they were exterminated by the Caribs. Their language perished with them, only the long-living parrot went on talking it. This parrot story took the fancy of the public and was re-told in a hundred books, and was made the subject of poems in several countries—one by our own "Pleasures of Hope" Campbell.
Nevertheless I thought it would be worth while trying a little Spanish on old Polly of the Lamb, and thought it best to begin by making friends. It was of little use to offer her something to eat. Poll was a person who rather despised sweeties and kickshaws. It had been the custom of the house for half a century to allow Polly to eat what she liked and when she liked, and as she—it was really a he—was of a social disposition she preferred taking her meals with the family and eating the same food. At breakfast she would come to the table and partake of bacon and fried eggs, also toast and butter and jam and marmalade, at dinner it was a cut off the joint with (usually) two vegetables, then pudding or tart with pippins and cheese to follow. Between meals she amused herself with bird seed, but preferred a meaty mutton-bone, which she would hold in one hand or foot and feed on with great satisfaction. It wasnot strange that when I held out food for her she took it as an insult, and when I changed my tactics and offered to scratch her head she lost her temper altogether, and when I persisted in my advances she grew dangerous and succeeded in getting in several nips with her huge beak, which drew blood from my fingers.
It was only then, after all my best blandishments had been exhausted, and when our relations were at their worst, that I began talking to her in Spanish, in a sort of caressing falsetto like a "native" girl, calling her "Lorito" instead of Polly, coupled with all the endearing epithets commonly used by the women of the green continent in addressing their green pets. Polly instantly became attentive. She listened and listened, coming down nearer to listen better, the one eye she fixed on me shining like a fiery gem. But she spoke no word, Spanish or English, only from time to time little low inarticulate sounds came from her. It was evident after two or three days that she was powerless to recall the old lore, but to me it also appeared evident that some vague memory of a vanished time had been evoked—that she was conscious of a past and was trying to recall it. At all events the effect of the experiment was that her hostility vanished, and we becamefriends at once. She would come down to me, step on to my hand, climb to my shoulder, and allow me to walk about with her.
It saddened me a few months later to receive a letter from her mistress announcing Polly's death, on 2nd December 1909.
I have thought since that this bird, instead of being only five years old when bought, was probably aged twenty-five years or more. Naturally, the girl who had been sent into the market-place to dispose of the bird would tell a possible buyer that it was young; the parrots one wants to buy are generally stated to be five years old. However, it may be that the bird grew old before its time on account of its extraordinary dietary. The parrot may have an adaptive stomach, still, one is inclined to think that half a century of fried eggs and bacon, roast pork, boiled beef and carrots, steak and onions, and stewed rabbit must have put a rather heavy strain on its system.
Many parrots have lived longer than Polly in captivity, long as her life was; and here it strikes me as an odd circumstance that Polly's specific name was bestowed on the species, the double-fronted amazon, as a compliment to the distinguished French ornithologist, La Valainte, who has himselfrecorded the greatest age to which a captive parrot has been known to attain. This bird was the familiar African grey species. He says that it began to lose its memory at the age of sixty, to moult irregularly at sixty-five, that it became blind at ninety, and died aged ninety-three.
We may well believe that if parrots are able to exist for fifty years to a century in the unnatural conditions in which they are kept, caged or chained in houses, over-fed, without using their enormously-developed wing-muscles, the constant exercise of which must be necessary to perfect health and vigour, their life in a state of nature must be twice as long.
To return to parrots in general. This bird has perhaps more points of interest for us than any other of the entire class: his long life, unique form, and brilliant colouring, extreme sociability, intelligence beyond that of most birds, and, last, his faculty of imitating human speech more perfectly than the birds of other families.
The last is to most persons the parrot's greatest distinction; to me it is his least. I do not find it so wonderful as the imitative faculty of some mocking birds or even of our delightful little marsh-warbler, described in another book. This may be because I have never had the good fortune to meet with ashining example, for we know there is an extraordinary difference in the talking powers of parrots, even in those of the same species—differences as great, in fact, as we find in the reasoning faculty between dog and dog, and in the songs of different birds of the same species. Not once but on several occasions I have heard a song from some common bird which took my breath away with astonishment. I have described in another book certain blackbirds of genius I have encountered. And what a wonderful song that caged canary in a country inn must have had, which tempted the great Lord Peterborough, a man of some shining qualities, to get the bird from its mistress, an old woman who loved it and refused to sell it to him, by means of a dishonest and very mean trick. Denied the bird, he examined it minutely and went on his way. In due time he returned with a canary closely resembling the one he wanted in size, colour, and markings, concealed on his person. He ordered dinner, and when the good woman was gone from the room to prepare it, changed his bird for hers, then, having had his meal, went on his way rejoicing. Still he was curious to learn the effect of his trick, and whether or not she had noticed any difference in her loved bird; so, after a long interval, he came oncemore to the inn, and seeing the bird in its cage in the old place began to speak in praise of its beautiful singing as he had heard it and remembered it so well. She replied sadly that since he listened to and wanted to buy it an unaccountable change had come over her bird. It was silent for a spell, perhaps sick, but when it resumed singing its voice had changed and all the beautiful notes which everyone admired were lost. The great man expressed his regret, and went away chuckling at his deliciously funny joke.
The ordinary talking parrot is no more to me than the ordinary or average canary, piping his thin expressionless notes; he is a prodigy I am pleased not to know. On the other hand there are numerous authenticated cases of parrots possessed of really surprising powers, and it was doubtless the mimicking powers of such birds of genius which suggested such fictions as that of the Totá Kuhami in the East; and in Europe, Gresset's lively tale ofVert Vertand the convent nuns.
It was perhaps a parrot of this rare kind which played so important a part in the early history of South America. It is nothing but a legend of the Guarani nation, which inhabit Paraguay, nevertheless I do believe that we have here an accountmainly true of an important event in the early history of the race or nation. This parrot is not the impossible bird of the fictitious Totá Kahami order we all know, who not only mimics our speech but knows the meaning of the words he utters. He was nothing but a mimic, exceptionally clever, and the moral of the story is the familiar one that great events may proceed from the most trivial causes, once the passions of men are inflamed.
The tradition was related centuries ago to the Jesuit Fathers in Paraguay, and I give it as they tell it, briefly.
•       •       •       •       •
In the beginning a great canoe came over the waters from the east and was stranded on the shores of Brazil. Out of the canoe came the brothers Tupi and Guarani and their sons and daughters with their husbands and wives and their children and children's children.
Tupi was the leader, and being the eldest was called the father, and Tupi said to his brother: Behold, this great land with all its rivers and forests, abounding in fish and birds and beasts and fruit, is ours, for there are no other men dwelling in it; but we are few in number, let us therefore continue to live together with our children in one village.
Guarani consented, and for many years they lived together in peace and amity like one family, until at last there came a quarrel to divide them. And it was all about a parrot that could talk and laugh and sing just like a man. A woman first found it in the forest, and not wishing to burden herself with the rearing of it she gave it to another woman. So well did it learn to talk from its new mistress that everybody admired it and it grew to be the talk of the village.
Then the woman who had found and brought it, seeing how much it was admired and talked about, went and claimed it as her own. The other refused to give it up, saying that she had reared it and had taught it all it knew, and by doing so had become its rightful owner.
Now, no person could say which was in the right, and the dispute was not ended and tongues continued wagging until the husbands of the two women became engaged in the quarrel. And then brothers and sisters and cousins were drawn into it, until the whole village was full of bitterness and strife, all because of the parrot, and men of the same blood for the first time raised weapons against one another. And some were wounded and others killed in open fight, and some were treacherously slain when hunting in the forest.
Now when things had come to this pass Tupi the Father, called his brother to him and said: O brother Guarani, this is a day of grief to us who had looked to the spending of our remaining years together with all our children at this place where we have lived so long. Now this can no longer be on account of the great quarrel about a parrot, and the shedding of blood; for only by separating our twofamiliescan we save them from destroying one another. Come then, let us divide them and lead them away in opposite directions, so that when we settle again they may be far apart. Guarani consented, and he also said that Tupi was the elder and their head, and was called the Father, and it was therefore in his right to remain in possession of the village and of all that land and to end his days in it. He, on his part, would call his people together and lead them to a land so distant that the two families would never see nor hear of each other again, and there would be no more bitter words and strife between them.
Then the two old brothers bade each other an eternal farewell, and Guarani led his people south a great distance and travelled many moons until he came to the River Paraguay, and settled there; and his people still dwell there and are called by his name to this day.
Only, I beg to add, they do not call their nation by that word, as the Spanish colonists first spelt it in their carelessness, and as they pronounce it. Heaven knows howwepronounce it! They, the Guarani people, call themselves Wä-rä-nä-eé, in a soft musical voice. Also they call their river, which we spell Paraguay, and pronounce I don't know how, Pä-rä-wä-eé.
CHAPTER XIV
SOMETHING PRETTY IN A GLASS CASE
It was said by a Norfolk naturalist more than three-quarters of a century ago, that the desire to possess "something pretty in a glass case" caused the killing of very many birds, especially of such as were rare and beautiful, which if allowed to exist in our country would maintain the species and be a constant source of pleasure to all who beheld them. For who, walking by a riverside, does not experience a thrill of delight at the sudden appearance in the field of vision of that living jewel, the shining blue kingfisher! This is one of the favourites of all who desire to have something pretty in a glass case in the cottage parlour in room of the long-vanished pyramid of wax flowers and fruit. It is, however, not only the common people, the cottager and the village publican who desire to possess such ornaments. You see them also in baronial halls. Many a time on visiting a great house the first thing the owner has drawn my attention to has been his stuffed birds in a glass case: but in the great houses the peregrine,and hobby, and goshawk, and buzzard and harrier are more prized than the kingfisher and other pretty little birds.
The Philistine we know is everywhere and is of all classes.
It is to me a cause of astonishment that these mournful mementoes should be regarded as they appear to be, as objects pleasing to the eye, like pictures and statues, tapestries, and other decorative works of art. The sight of a stuffed bird in a house is revolting to me; it outrages our sense of fitness, and is as detestable as stuffed birds and wings, tails and heads, and beaks of murdered and mutilated birds on women's headgear. "Properly speaking," said St George Mivart in his greatest work, "there is no such thing as a dead bird." The life is the bird, and when that has gone out what remains is the case. These dead empty cases are as much to me as to any naturalist, and I can examine the specimens in a museum cabinet with interest. But the mental attitude is changed at the sight of these same dead empty cases set up in imitation of the living creature; and the more cleverly the stuffer has done his work the more detestable is the result.
It may be that some vague notion of a faint remnant of life lingering in the life-like specimen withglass eyes, is the cause of my hatred of the feathered ornament in a glass case. At all events I have had one experience, to be related here, which has almost made me believe that the idea of a sort of post-mortem life in the stuffed bird is not wholly fanciful. I will call it:
A DIALOGUE OF THE DEAD (AND STUFFED)
Ever since I came the wind has been blowing a gale on this furthermost, lonely, melancholy coast, as if I had got not only to the Land's End, but to the end of the world itself, to the confines of Old Chaos his kingdom, a region where the elements are in everlasting conflict. Two or three times during the afternoon I have resolutely put on my cap and water-proof and gone out to face it, only to be quickly driven in again by the bitter furious blast. Yet it was almost as bad indoors to have to sit and listen by the hour to its ravings. From time to time I get up and look through the window-pane at the few cold grey naked cottages and empty bleak fields, divided by naked grey stone fences, and, beyond the fields, the foam-flecked, colder, greyer, more desolate ocean. Would it be better, I wonder, to fight my way down to those wave-loosened masses of graniteby the sea, where I would hear the roar and thunder of the surf instead of this perpetual insane howling and screaming of the wind round the house? I turn from the window with a shiver; a splash of rain hurled against it has blotted the landscape out; I go back once more to my comfortable easy-chair by the fire. Patience! Patience! By and by, I say to myself—I say it many times over—daylight will be gone; then the lamp will be brought in, the curtains drawn, and tea will follow, with buttered toast and other good things. Then the solacing pipe, and thoughts and memories and some pleasant waking drawn to while away the time.
What shall this dream be? Ah, what but the best of all possible dreams on such a day as this—a dream of spring! Somewhere in the sweet west country I shall stand in a wood where beeches grow; and it will be April, near the end of the month, before the leaves are large enough to hide the blue sky and the floating white clouds so far above their tops. Perhaps I shall sit down on one of the huge root-branches, "coiled like a grey old snake," so as to gaze at ease before me at the cloud of purple-red boughs, and interlacing twigs, sprinkled over with golden buds and silky opening leaves of a fresh brilliant green that has no match on the earth or sea, nor under theearth in the emerald mines. I shall watch the love-flight of the cushat above the wood, mounting higher and higher, then gliding down on motionless dove-coloured wings; and I shall listen to the wood wren, ever wandering and singing in the tree-tops—singing that same insistent, passionate—passionless strain to which one could listen for ever.
I shall ask for no other song, but there will be other creatures there. Down the tall grey trunk of a beech tree before me a squirrel will slip—down, down nearly to the mossy roots, then pause and remain so motionless as to seem like a squirrel-shaped patch of bright chestnut-red moss or lichen or alga on the grey bark. And on the next tree, but a little distance off, I shall presently catch sight of another listener and watcher—a green woodpecker clinging vertically against the trunk, so still as to look like a bird figure carved in wood and painted green and gold and crimson.
Just when I had got so far with the thought of what my dream was to be, I raised my eyes from the fire and allowed them to rest attentively for the first time on a collection of ornaments crowded together in a niche in the wall at the side of the fireplace. The ornamental objects one sees in a cottage are as a rule offensive to me, and I have acquired the habitof not seeing them; now I was compelled to look at these. There were photographs, little china vases and cups with boys or cupids, and things of that kind; these I did not regard; my whole attention was directed to a pair of glass-fronted cases and the living creatures in them. They were not really alive, but dead and stuffed and set up in life-like attitudes, and one was a squirrel, the other a green woodpecker. The squirrel with his back to his neighbour sat up on his mossy wood, his bushy tail thrown along his back, his two little hands grasping a hazel-nut, which he was in the act of conveying to his mouth. The green woodpecker was placed vertically against his branch, his side towards his neighbour, his head turned partly round so that he looked directly at him with one eye. That wide-open white glass eye and the whole attitude of the bird, with his wings half open and beak raised, gave him a wonderfully alert look, so that after regarding him fixedly for some time I began to imagine that, despite the old dead dusty look of the feathers, there was something of life still remaining in him and that he really was watching his neighbour with the nut very intently.
Why, of course he was alive—alive and speaking to the squirrel! I could hear him distinctly. Thewind outside was madly beating against the house and trying to force its way through the window, and was making a hundred strange noises—little sharp shrill broken sounds that mixed with and filled the pauses between the wailing and shrieking gusts, and somehow the woodpecker was catching these small sounds in his beak and turning them into words.
"Hullo!" he said. "Who are you and what are you doing there?"
"I'm a squirrel," responded the other. "I've said so over and over again, but you will go on worrying me! My only wish is that I could bring my tail just a little more to the right so as to hide my head and paws altogether from you."
"But you can't. Hullo! squirrel, what are you doing there? You forgot to tell me that."
"I'm eating a nut, confound you! You know it; I've told you ten thousand times. I can't ever get it up quite close enough to bite it and I haven't tasted one for seventeen years. One forgets what a thing tastes like."
"I know. I've been fasting just as long myself. Never an ant's egg! Hullo! Have you got it up? How does it taste?"
"Taste! You fool! If I could only move I wouldn't mind the nut; I'd go for you like a shot,and if I could get at you I'd tear you to pieces. I hate you!"
"Why do you hate me, squirrel?"
"More questions! Because you're green and yellow like the woods where I lived. There were beeches and oaks. And because your head is crimson red like the agarics I used to find in the woods in autumn. I used to eat them for fun just because they said they were poisonous and it would kill you to eat them."
"And that's what you died of? Hullo! Why don't you answer me? Where did you find red agarics?
"I've told you, I've told you, I've told you, in Treve woods where I lived, very far from here on the other side of Lostwithiel."
"Treve woods, between the hills away beyond Lostwithiel! Why, squirrel, that's where I lived."
"So I've heard; you have said it every day and every night these seventeen years. I hate you."
"Hullo! Why do you hate me?"
"I always disliked woodpeckers. I remember a pair that made a hole in a beech near the tree my drey was in. I played those two yafflers with their laugh laugh laugh some good tricks, and the best of all was when their young began to come out. Onemorning when the old birds were away I hid myself in the fork above the hole and waited till they crept out and up close to me, when I suddenly burst out upon them, chattering and flourishing my tail, and they were so terrified they actually lost their hold on the bark and tumbled right down to the ground. How I enjoyed it!"
"You malicious little red beast! You chattering little red devil! They were my young ones, and I remember what a fright we were in when we came back and saw what had happened. It was lucky we didn't lose one! I shall never speak to you again. There you may sit trying to eat your nut for another seventeen years, and for a hundred years if this horrible life is going to last so long, but you'll never get another word from me."
"I thought that would touch you, woodpecker! Ha, ha, ha—who's the yaffler now? What a relief; at last I shall be left to eat my nut in peace and quiet, here in this glass case where they put me."
"Why did they put us here?"
"You are speaking to me! Are the hundred years over so soon?"
"There's no one else—what am I to do? Answer me, why did they put us here? Answer me, little red wretch! I don't mind now what you did—theywere not hurt after all. You didn't know what you were doing—you had no young ones of your own."
"Hadn't I indeed! My little ones were there close by in the drey."
"And when they were out of the drey did you teach them to run about in the tree, and jump from one branch to another, and pass from tree to tree?"
"I never saw them leave the drey—I was shot."
"Where was that, squirrel?"
"In the Treve Woods where the big beeches are, beyond Lostwithiel."
"Never! Why, that's just where I lived and was shot, too. Did it hurt you, squirrel?"
"I don't know. I saw a flash and remembered no more until I found myself dead in the man's pocket pressed against some wet soft thing. Did it hurt you?"
"Yes, very much. I fell when he fired and tried to get away, but he chased and caught me and the blood ran out on to his hand. He wiped it off on his coat, then squeezed my sides with his finger and thumb until I was dead, then put me in his pocket. There was some dead warm soft thing in it."
Here there was a break in the talk owing to a momentary lull in the wind. I listened intently, but the shrieking and wailing noises without hadceased and with them the sharp little voices had died away. Then suddenly the wind rose and shrieked again and the talk recommenced.
"Hullo!" said the woodpecker. "Do you see a man sitting by the fire looking at us? He has been staring at us that way all the evening."
"What of it! Everyone who comes into this room and sits by the fire does the same. It's nothing new."
"It is—it is! Listen to me, squirrel. He looks as if he could hear and understand us. That's new, isn't it? And he has a strange look in his eyes. Do you know, I think he is going mad."
"I don't mind, woodpecker. I shouldn't care if he were to run out on to the rocks at the Land's End and cast himself into the sea."
"Nor should I. But just think, if before rashing out to put an end to himself he should, in his raving madness, snatch down our cases from the niche and crush them into the grate with his heel!"
"What do you mean, woodpecker? Could such a thing happen?"
"Yes, if he really is insane, and if he is listening to us, and we are making him worse."
"If I could believe such a thing! I should cease to hate you, woodpecker. No, no, I can't believe it!"
"Just think, old neighbour, to have it end at last! Burnt up to ashes and smoke—feathers and hair, glass eyes, cottonwool stuffing and all!"
"Never again to hear that everlasting Hullo! To hate you and hate you and tell you a thousand thousand times, only to begin it all over again!"
"To fly up away in the smoke, out out out in the wind and rain!"
"The rain! the rain!"
"The rain from the south-west that made me laugh my loudest! Raining all day, wetting my green feathers, wetting every green leaf in the woods beyond Lostwithiel. Raining until all the stony gullies were filled to overflowing, and the water ran and gurgled and roared until the whole wood was filled with the sound."
"No, no, woodpecker, I can't, I can't believe it!"
"It's true! It's true! Don't you see it coming, squirrel? Look at him! Look at him! Now, now! At last! At last! At last!"
Suddenly their sharp agitated voices fell to a broken whispering and died into silence. For the wind had lulled again. Looking closely at them I thought I could see a new expression in their immovable glass eyes. It frightened me, I began to be frightened at myself; for it now seemed to me thatI really was becoming insane, and I was suddenly seized with a fierce desire to snatch the cases down and crush them into the fire with my heel. To save myself from such a mad act I jumped up, and picking up my candle, hurried upstairs to my bedroom. No sooner did I reach it than the wind was up again, wailing and shrieking louder than ever, and between the gusts there were the murmurings and strange small noises of the wind in the roof, and once more I began to catch the sound of their renewed talk. "Gone! gone!" they said or seemed to say. "Our last hope! What shall we do, what shall we do? Years! Years! Years!" Then by and by the tone changed, and there were question and answer. "When was that, squirrel?" I heard; and then a furious quarrel with curses from the squirrel, and "hullos" and renewed questions from the woodpecker, and memories of their life and death in Treve Wood, beyond Lostwithiel.
What wonder that, when hours later I fell asleep, I had the most distressing and maddest dreams imaginable!
One dream was that when men die and go to hell, they are sent in large baskets-full to the taxidermists of the establishment, who are highly proficient in the art, and set them up in the most perfectlife-like attitudes, with wideawake glass eyes, blue or dark, in their sockets, their hair varnished to preserve its natural colour and glossy appearance. They are placed separately in glass cases to keep them from the dust, and the cases are set up in pairs in niches in the walls of the palace of hell. The lord of the place takes great pride in these objects; one of his favourite amusements is to sit in his easy-chair in front of a niche to listen by the hour to the endless discussions going on between the two specimens, in which each expresses his virulent but impotent hatred of the other, damning his glass eyes; at the same time relating his own happy life and adventures in the upper sunlit world, how important a person he was in his own parish of borough, and what a gorgeous time he was having when he was unfortunately nabbed by one of the collectors or gamekeepers in his lordship's service.