“Now what do you suppose the birds mean by all that outcry?” said my friend.
I answered that very likely there was a hawk or an owl there.
“Let’s go and see,” said the master, and we turned in that direction. Sure enough, we soon came face to face with a large hen-hawk perched in one of the trees, while the jays, one after another, were dashing as near him as they dared, yelling at him as they passed.
At our nearer approach the hawk took wing; then the jays disappeared, and silence fell upon the woods. And I dare say the schoolmaster gave me credit for being a wondrously wise man!
The jay has many notes, and once in a great while may even be heard indulging in something like a warble. One of his most musical calls sounds to my ears a little like the word “lily.”
He seems to be very fond of acorns, and is frequently to be seen standing upon a limb, holding an acorn under his claw and hammering it to pieces with all the force of his stout bill. When angered, he scolds violently, bobbing up and down in a most ridiculous manner. In fact, he is of a highly nervous temperament, and as full of gesticulations as a Frenchman.
To me he is especially a bird of autumn. At that season the woods are loud with his clarion, and as I listen to it I can often feel myself a boy again, rambling in the woods that knew me in my school-days. With all his faults—his ill treatment of small birds, I mean—I should be sorry to have his numbers greatly diminished.
XII
THE KINGBIRD
As a very small boy I spent much time in a certain piece of rather low ground partly grown up to bushes. Here in early spring I picked bunches of pretty pink and white flowers, which I now know to have been anemones. In the same place, a month or two later, I gathered splendid red lilies, and admired, without gathering it, a tiny blue flower with a yellow centre. This would not bear taking home, but was always an attraction to me. I should have liked it better still, I am sure, if some one had been kind enough to tell me its pretty name—blue-eyed grass.
Here, also, I picked the first strawberries of the season and the first blueberries. They were luxuries indeed. A “gill-cup” full of either of them was good pay for an hour’s search.