Read Ebook: Tales of the birds by Fowler W Warde William Warde Hook Bryan Illustrator

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Ebook has 570 lines and 49282 words, and 12 pages

Cocktail was quite himself again, but he had reckoned without his host: how was he, poor bird, to know what the Marlborough Downs were like in winter? How was he to guess that instead of reaching some deep warm valley at sunset, they might fly on till after dark, and indeed perhaps all through the night, without a chance of escaping from that terrible wind? Long, undulating plains, all shrouded in white; rounded hills, whose dim whiteness melted into leaden gray as it met the snow-laden clouds; here and there a shelterless dip, down which the wind swept almost more wildly than on the open plain: between these they had to choose, if choose they would: and as one was no better than the other, they went straight on.

At last they reached a rather deeper and wider hollow, at the bottom of which a large road ran. A high bank sheltered this road to the north, and at the top of the bank was a hedge. It was now dark, blowing and snowing furiously.

"This is our only chance, Feltie," said Cocktail: "but see there where the road turns a little; there we can get a better shelter."

And here, just where an old ruined turnpike cottage stood between the road and the bank, with long brown grass growing behind it, they settled down for the night--a night which few who live on those downs will ever forget. Feltie himself used afterwards to say that they must have died, but for one solitary piece of good fortune. The two birds had crouched down in the long grass at the foot of the bank close to each other, and put their heads under their wings, but sleep would not come; they were too hungry and too wretched. Some time after dark a rustling was heard in the frozen grass; some four-footed creature was coming.

"Fox!" whispered Cocktail; "but I can't fly, and if I could, where should we go? It's all up, I fear, but crouch closer in the grass and see."

It was not a fox; it was a hare. Puss came softly in behind the ruined cottage, and crouched down quietly close to the birds. They kept perfectly still. When she was fast asleep Cocktail whispered to Feltie to move up to her, and did so himself, getting as near her warm breath as possible. Feltie followed his example. And thus they passed the night, tolerably warm and comfortable, and even sleeping. Puss never offered to stir, and was still fast asleep when they left her in the morning.

The next day, no breakfast. Not a morsel of food was to be found anywhere. The fields were deep in snow. Once they tried a rickyard, but the farmer's son came out with his gun, and they had to take to flight again, frightened out of their lives. Their wings were getting feeble, and they often had to alight on the ground and rest; and after resting, every fresh starting was more difficult than the last. Cocktail said little, and seemed to be getting deaf and sleepy; Feltie had to take the lead and keep the lookout. They passed at midday over some lower-lying country, and then, almost without knowing it, they once more found themselves upon a high, bleak table-land of never-ending down. As night fell they sank quite exhausted on the sheltered side of a high hill, whose flanks were clothed thickly with gorse, hoping that some friendly hare might again favour them with her company.

In the middle of the night Cocktail suddenly spoke: "Feltie," he said, "we ought to have stayed in that park. If I had known what was coming I would have stayed, but one can't know everything. You may have to go on without me to-morrow; if I can't fly, you must go on. I'm your leader, and this is my last order. Go on till you get food, and when the frost goes, come back this way if you care to. If you don't find me, tell Jack and Jill that they were right, and I was wrong. Good-night once more, old Feltie; mind and do as I tell you."

Cocktail said these last words with something of his old cheerful tone of authority; then he put his head under his wing again. Feltie said nothing, but nestled closer to him. When morning broke, and Feltie ruffled his feathers and looked about him as usual, Cocktail did not do the same. His head was still under his wing, but not a feather stirred; Cocktail was dead, and frozen hard. Feltie shuddered and flew away, hardly knowing where he went.

It did not indeed much matter which way he went. Death was all around. The only living creature abroad was a wandering carrion crow, whose melancholy croak seemed to tell that he too was starving. The broad white pall lay silently over the whole plain; the sky was still overcast, and the wind blew from the north-east with hardly less cruel violence than on the day before. It was more the wind than his own wings that carried Feltie along. Those wings were stiff and painful, and would do their work no longer. And he, too, like poor Cocktail, was getting drowsy with hunger and fatigue; life was going slowly out of him. He did not feel much pain; he simply kept getting every minute more tired, more sleepy, and, strange to say, more comfortable.

After a time he came to the edge of a steep hill, at the foot of which was a straggling village. It looked desolate enough, for the thatched roofs were covered with snow, and tall elms above them swayed in the howling wind. Beyond the village were some flat meadows, full of ditches, and divided by a stream not yet quite frozen over; on the other side of the meadows the downs rose steeply again. Feltie had not enough life left in him to feel that there was any hope for him in this valley; he was simply drifting like a dead leaf or a snowflake, and it little mattered where he stopped. Somewhere the leaf would settle and decay, somewhere the snowflake would drop and melt: somewhere too the poor starving bird must rest from his last flight, and sink into a never-ending sleep. The wind took him over the brow of the hill, and with a series of little flights, ever growing shorter and feebler, he made his way down the white slope, and settled, almost stupefied, under the leeward side of a large barn, which stood close to a farmhouse on the outskirts of the village. There he sat crouching, his head sunk into his neck, his tail and wings drooping, his eyes half closed--a very different bird from the Feltie who had started on his journey three days before, quite unconscious of trouble and pain.

What was this? Human voices, laughter, coming round the corner of the barn! Feltie had never been so near a human being before. He tried to fly, but it was impossible; no strength was left. His heart beat, and he crouched closer to the ground. Then two small ploughboys, shouting and snowballing each other, burst round the barn; the foremost, seeing Feltie, at once ran up and seized him, thus offering a splendid aim to his pursuer, who sent a snowball at him which took deadly effect on him. But the first boy popped Feltie into his pocket, and ran off, crying out as he ran:

"I'se got a bird: thee sha'n't have none of un!"

Down the village street he ran, making for his father's cottage, but had got no farther than the vicarage gate, which was half way down the street, when another well-compacted snowball, delivered from behind the gate, knocked his hat off into the road, and filled one ear with snow which at once began to trickle gently down his neck. He looked up with a red face, and saw the vicar's son, a boy of fourteen, swinging on the gate and laughing with all his might.

"Oh, that was a beauty!" he said: "Oh, that was a tickler for you, Bill!"

"Thou beest a beast," was Bill's reply. He didn't mean a pun, but perhaps there was a pleasant emphasis in the doubled syllable. "Thou beest a beast, thou beest."

"What's that?" said the swinger on the gate suddenly jumping down. "What am I? I'll teach you--" But Bill did not stop to hear what he was to be taught. He took to his heels again and ran like a deer. But the vicar's son was more than a match for awkward Bill at running, and in less than a hundred yards he collared him and had him down in a twinkling on the snow in the deserted street.

"I'll teach you to call me names, you young cad." And he began his lesson by scientifically "bagging" Bill's wind.

"Doan't thee pummel I, doan't thee now," said panting Bill. "I'll gi' thee a bird I'se got in my pocket, if thee woan't pummel I no more."

"Where's the bird? Get up and show it me directly, you young lubber," said his conqueror, keeping a fast hold of his prisoner's collar, the better to secure the execution of the bargain. Bill sulkily obeyed, and produced Feltie from his pocket. But the jolting and banging produced by Bill's headlong flight in his heavy hob-nailed boots had been too much for Feltie; he still breathed, but his eyes were shut and he was in fact quite unconscious of what was going on. The vicar's boy let go Bill's collar, and taking Feltie in both hands, began to walk back to the vicarage gate.

In two minutes he and Feltie were in the snug warm drawing-room of the vicarage, where his mother and three sisters were sitting by the fire at work.

"Don't be frightened, mother," said George, as he sat down on the hearthrug to thaw; "it's only a fieldfare."

"What is a fieldfare, George?" asked his youngest sister.

"Brandy, George! Who ever heard of a bird drinking brandy!"

"Now do you ladies want to save this bird's life, or do you not?" said Master George impatiently. "Because if you do, Minnie will go and shut up the cat and dog, and Edith go and get some drops of brandy, and Katie will get me a quill pen to pour the brandy down his throat with, and mother--"

"And mother will take care of the bird until George has changed his jacket, for he's dripping on to the hearthrug like old Father Christmas," said the mother, and quietly took Feltie out of his hand into her lap, where she began to stroke him gently. "Now, George, make haste, or he'll die before you're down again."

They all ran off on their several commissions, and when George came down again, still putting on his jacket in his hurry, they were all assembled round the mother, who had Feltie on a napkin in her lap, and was cutting a quill pen into a proper shape for giving him the first and last medicine he ever had in his life. George held the bird's beak open, while she deftly contrived to slip a single drop of brandy in half a teaspoonful of water down his throat; in five minutes she gave him another dose, and then another; and now Feltie's eyes opened wide, and his feathers began to quiver slightly all over him.

"Now, mother, put your two hands over him, and keep him quite warm for a bit. He'll do, I expect," said George.

It was a bold experiment to give a bird brandy-and-water, but on this occasion it answered its purpose. In another hour or two Feltie was able to eat a few shreds of meat, which were given him at the suggestion of the vicar, who had now come in, and was taking much interest in his recovery. Then he wanted to go to sleep, but the bright light of the room made him feel very uncomfortable, and the loud human voices sounded harsh and strange in his ears. There was much discussion as to where he should be put for the night; but the vicar decided that he should sleep in the conservatory, which was warmed with hot water. So they carried him there in procession, and left him in a warm corner on a heap of the gardener's matting, with plenty of scraps of meat and crumbs, and a saucer of water if he should be thirsty in the night. So Feltie fell fast asleep, and dreamt of poor Cocktail all alone and frozen under the gorse on Salisbury plain; and George too fell fast asleep in his snug bed, and dreamt that a whole flock of fieldfares were come to the vicarage, asking for brandy-and-water to be given them with a quill pen.

Next morning George was down betimes, half dressed, and in a state of great excitement, to see how his fieldfare was getting on. But Feltie was awake still earlier, and had already taken his breakfast when George opened the conservatory door. He felt quite strong again, and with his strength had returned all his dread of human beings. So no sooner was the boy inside the door, than he began to flutter among the plants, and then flew up to the glass roof and tried to struggle through it. Then he came down again, and smelling the fresh air coming through the door, was attracted in that direction, and in another minute was free. Off went George after him--over the garden wall, where he dropped a slipper, for he had not had time to put on his boots; across the road, through the hedge, which tore his trousers and scratched his face; over the orchard, and up into the stubble-field beyond, where a shepherd who was tending the new-born lambs that had been dropped in spite of the snowstorm, was much astonished to see the vicar's son tearing along without a hat, without his boots, and with his usually neat collar flying behind him secured by only a single button. But still Feltie went on, and George, seeing that he was able to shift for himself, gave up the pursuit, and consoled himself by a talk with the shepherd about the young lambs and their mothers, before he went home to dress and tell his tale.

Meanwhile Feltie had perched on a hedge some distance away, and began to look about him. "What was this he felt? Surely it was not so cold, and the wind was blowing gently from the south-west. Was not the snow melting?" "Was not it beginning to rain?"

"Chak-chak! Chak-chak!" cried Feltie, suddenly finding his voice: "the storm is over, the fields will be soft again, the worms will come to the surface, and perhaps the sun will shine again soon! Chak-chak!"

His voice was answered feebly from a distance. Then over a hedge came half-a-dozen fieldfares, flying weakly, as he had done the day before. He joined them, and they gave him welcome, and told him how they too had gone southwards, a brave band of fifteen, of whom only six were now alive; how they had gone on and on till they had reached a stormy sea which they were too weak to cross; and how they had turned back again in despair, and were now returning northwards.

Feltie told them his story too; and then the seven set out on their journey; and in the afternoon the sun shone warmly out of the rainy clouds, the lark rose in the air and sang, the robins sat on moist twigs and cheered them with a strain as they passed; the streams rose, full of melting snow, and rushed over their banks into the meadows, moistening them and making them soft and pleasant to the searching bills of hungry birds: the air was soft, wet, and delicious, and in the fields they heard the bleating of the young lambs, and the calls of neighbouring parties of fieldfares and redwings.

At last when they neared the familiar spot which Feltie had left but a few days before, he bade farewell to his fellow-travellers and turned with a beating heart in the direction of the well-known elm-trees, standing in the flat meadows where the stream wound here and there under its brambly archway.

His loud "chak-chak" was answered: there were some old friends there still. There was Jill: and there too was Jack: they had saved their lives, then, by staying in the friendly park among the thorn-trees. But that terrible storm had done its work upon the little company: more than half were still missing, and Feltie himself was almost the last straggler to arrive. Many an adventure had to be narrated, and many a story of struggle for life and death; but there was none so thrilling as the winter's tale that Feltie had to tell, and no loss so sadly to be bewailed as the death of the brilliant Cocktail in the gorse on the dreary frozen down.

OUT OF TUNE.

"Spirits are not finely touched But to fine issues."

In a certain manufacturing town, of no great size, there lived a musician. For the most part he gained his living by playing at concerts and giving lessons; but he was young, ardent, and clever, and he had always nursed a hope that he might one day be a great composer. He felt a soul of music within him, that wanted to come out and express itself. But, though he had had a complete training in composition, and had written much music and published a little, no one took any notice of what he composed; it was too good to sell well , and he had never had a chance of having any of his larger works performed in public. And he began to get rather irritable and impatient, so that his wife was sometimes at her wits' end to know how to cheer him up and set him to work once more with a good heart.

Great was the poor man's delight when one day a letter arrived from the town clerk, to tell him that on the approaching visit of the Prince of Wales to open the new Town Hall, a grand concert was to be given, in which works by natives of the town were to be performed; and that he was invited to write a short cantata for voices and orchestra. A liberal sum was to be paid him, and he was to train his own choir, to have the best artists from London to help him, and to conduct his composition himself. The news put him in such a state of high spirits that now the prudent wife was obliged to pour a little cold water on his ambition, and tell him that he must not expect too much success all at once. But she made him comfortable in their little parlour, and kept the neighbours from breaking in upon his work; and for some time the cantata went on at a flowing pace, until nearly half of it was done.

After a while however the musician's brain began to rebel against being kept in all day hard at work, and to refuse to keep quiet and rest in soothing sleep at night. It said as plainly as possible--"If you will go on driving me in harness all day long, I shall be obliged to fidget at night, and what is more, it is quite impossible for me to do such good work in the day as I used to. So take your choice: either you must give me repose sometimes, or I must cease to be able to find you beautiful melodies, and to show you how to treat them to the best advantage." But the musician did not know that his brain was complaining in this way, though his wife heard it quite well; and he went on driving it harder than ever, whipping it up and spurring it on, though it had hardly any strength left to pull the cantata along with it. And all this time he was shutting himself away from his friends, who used formerly to come often and refresh him with a friendly chat in the evenings; he refused to go with his wife and visit the very poor people whom they had been in the habit of comforting out of their slender store; he lost his temper several times with his pupils, and one day boxed a boy's ears for playing a wrong note twice over, so that the father threatened to summon him before the magistrates and have him fined for assault; and his wife began at last to fear that his stroke of good luck had done him more harm than good.

One morning he got up after a restless night, in which his poor brain had been complaining as usual without being taken any notice of, and settled himself down in the parlour after breakfast with the cantata, feeling worried and tired both in his body and mind. With great labour and trouble he finished the last chorus of his first part, and uttered a sigh of relief. The next thing to be done was to write the first piece of the second part, which was to be an air for a single voice, and was to be sung at the concert by one of the best singers in the country. All the rest of the cantata had been thought out carefully before he began to write; but this song, for which beautiful words were chosen from an old poet, had never worked itself out in his brain so as to satisfy him. And now the poor brain was called upon for inspiration, just at a time when it was hardly fit even to do clerk's work.

"You little noisy fiend!" he cried angrily, "putting in your miserable little twopenny pipe, when a poor human artist is struggling to sing. Don't you know, you little wretch, that art is long and time is fleeting?"

He jumped up, took down the cage with an ungentle hand, and carried it into another room, where he drew a heavy shawl over it and shut the door. The canary's song was stifled, but the musician's song was not a bit the better for it. And after a while there came another annoyance. The house was small and not very solidly built, and though the room where he was at work did not look out on the street, any street-calls, bands, hurdy-gurdys, or such like noise-making enemies, could be heard there quite distinctly. This time it was a street-boy whistling a tune; it was not a bad tune, and it was whistled with a good heart; indeed the boy put so much energy into his performance, that he must have been in very high spirits. And why did he stop there so long? Generally they passed by, and the tails of their tunes disappeared in the distance, or they turned down the next street. But this one was clearly stopping there on purpose to annoy the composer.

He went softly into the front room, keeping out of sight from the window. He was seized with a desire to wreak vengeance on this tormentor, but he was not quite clear how to do it, and must survey his ground first. Stepping behind the window-curtain, he peeped out between the curtain and the window-frame, and saw a small boy, whistling hard, with a long string in his hand, which descended into the area below. The musician stood on tiptoe, and looked down into the area; it was a sort of relief to him to see what this urchin was about. At the end of the string he perceived a dead mouse, which was being made to jump up and down and counterfeit life, as well as was possible under the circumstances, for the benefit of a young cat of the household, who was lying in wait for it, springing on it, and each time finding it drawn away from her just as she thought her claws were fast fixed in it. This boy was in fact an original genius, who had invented this way of amusing himself; he called it cat-fishing, and it was excellent sport.

The musician suddenly flung up the window, and faced the boy, who seemed by no means disconcerted; he only left off whistling and looked hard at the musician.

"What are you doing with the cat?" said the latter, with all the dignity he could put on. "What business have you to meddle with my cat, and make that infernal din in front of my house?"

The boy began slowly to haul up the string, looking all the while steadily at the composer.

"I say, guv'nor," he said, with a mock show of friendly interest, "do you know as you've got a blob of ink at the end o' your nose?"

The composer was taken aback. He certainly did not know it, but nothing was more likely, considering how he had been pulling his moustache and scratching his head with fingers which, as he glanced at them, showed some traces of ink. He put his hand involuntarily to his nose, and half turned to the glass over the chimney-piece. There was not a stain there: the nose was innocent of ink. Instantly he returned to the window, but the boy was gone; all that was left of him was a distant sound of "There's nae luck aboot the house" far down the street. The composer went gloomily back to his study, without a particle of music in his brain; the canary and the whistler had driven it all away. He sat down mechanically at his desk, but he might as well have sat down at the kitchen-table and tried to make it play like a piano.

He got up once more, and looked out of the window. The sun was again shining, and the little garden, fenced in between brick walls which caught the sunshine, and enlivened with a few annuals , did not look altogether uninviting. At the end of it was a little arbour which he had built himself, and a rose tree that he had planted against it was already beginning to blossom. The composer thought he would go and quiet himself down in this little arbour, and try and get his thoughts fixed upon the air he was to write. Out he went, and seated there, began to feel more at ease. After a while he began to think once more of the old poet's lines; and feeling as if music were coming into his brain again, went and fetched his manuscript and his pen and ink, to be ready in case he should have musical thoughts to write down.

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