“Will you be quiet at once!” she screamed, angrily. “That sounds so dismal that it makes one quite melancholy. You’d better see to it that the anemones come out. I think it’s high time. And, besides, one always feels warmer when there are others shivering too.”
Now, as soon as the anemones had heard the starling’s first whistle, they carefully stuck their heads out of the ground. But they were still so tightly tucked up in their green wraps that one could hardly see them. They looked like green buds which might turn into anything.
“It’s too early,” they whispered. “It’s a shame for the starling to call us. There’s no one in the world left that one can trust.”
Then the swallow came:
“Tsee! Tsee!” he whistled and darted through the air on his long, pointed wings. “Out with you, you silly flowers! Can’t you see that Dame Spring has come?”
But the anemones had become careful. They just pushed their green wraps a little to one side and peeped out:
“One swallow does not make a summer,” they said. “Where is your wife? You have only come to see if it’s possible to live here and now you’re trying to take us in. But we are not so stupid as all that. We know that, if once we catch cold, we’re done for.”
“You’re a pack of poltroons,” said the swallow and sat down on the weathercock on the ranger’s roof and looked out over the landscape.
But the anemones stood and waited and were very cold. One or two of them, who could not control their impatience, cast off their wraps in the sun. The cold killed them at night and the story of their pitiful death went from flower to flower and aroused great consternation.