Chapter Four.
“Peedle-Weedle-Wee.”
“There, only hark at that,” said Mrs Flutethroat; “who can possibly go to sleep with that noise going on—ding, ding, dinging in one’s ears?” saying which the good dame took her head from beneath her wing, and smoothed down her feathers as she spoke. “There never was such a nuisance as those bottle-tits anywhere.”
The noise that Mrs Flutethroat complained of proceeded from the low branches of a large fir-tree; and as the good dame listened the sounds came again louder than ever, “Peedle-weedle-wee, peedle-weedle-wee,” in a small, thready, pipy tone, as though the birds who uttered the cry had had their voices split up into two or three pieces.
“Peedle-weedle-wee, peedle-weedle-wee,” cried a row of little long-tailed birds, so small that they looked like little balls of feathers, with tiny black eyes and a black beak—so small that it was hardly worth calling a beak at all—stuck at one point, and a thin tail at the other extreme.
“Peedle-weedle-wee, peedle-weedle-wee,” they kept crying, which meant,—“Let me come inside where it’s warm;” and as they kept on whining the same cry, the outside birds kept flitting over the backs of those next to them, and trying to get a middle place. Then the next two did the same, and the next, and the next, until they all had done the same thing, when they began again; and all the while that wretched, querulous piping “peedle-weedle-wee” kept on, till Mrs Flutethroat grew so angry, and annoyed and irritable, that she felt as though she could have thrown one of her eggs at the tiresome little intruders on the peace of the garden.
“Peedle-weedle-wee, peedle-weedle-wee,” said the bottle-tits as busy as ever, trying to get the warmest spot.
“There they go again,” said Mrs Flutethroat; “why don’t you go somewhere else, and not make that noise there?”