His voice was so much shriller than usual that Jolly Robin knew instantly that something had displeased him.
“What’s happened to upset you?” Jolly Robin inquired, after Rusty had finished singing.
“I expect to come here and give my dawn song every morning,” Rusty remarked. “And if there’s anybody living in the orchard that objects, he had better move away at once.”
Of course Jolly Robin didn’t want to do that. And he said as much, too.
“But I hope you’ll sing a little more happily,” he told Rusty, “because I don’t like to hear people complaining—and neither does my wife.”
It is easy to understand why Farmer Green and his family overslept, when one knows that Rusty Wren no longer sang his dawn song beneath Farmer Green’s window. And when Rusty saw that the whole household never stirred until long after sunrise, he was so pleased that he couldn’t help making a few remarks about the new bird in the farmhouse, which had annoyed him so by singing “Cuckoo! cuckoo!”
“This stranger is a very poor songster!” Rusty said to his wife. “All he can sing is ‘Cuckoo! cuckoo!’ in that silly way of his. He has no trills and runs and ripples at all! And he can’t even repeat his song ten times a minute, as I give mine. He has to wait at least half an hour before he cries ‘Cuckoo! cuckoo!’ again. And no one but a simpleton would ever attempt to awaken a hard-working farmer by such half-hearted singing.”
Mrs. Rusty quite agreed with her husband.
“Farmer Green will be sorry he brought home such a worthless bird,” she said.