Its boastfulness make good,
It opened wide its beak and thus let fall the cheese,
Which Master Fox did seize——”
“Not so fast!” his uncle interrupted him. “Master Fox could not have gone on talking with the cheese in his mouth; he could not have pointed the moral in that neat little lesson with which the fable ends. I can see him putting his paw on the prize while he licks his chops and looks tauntingly at [[157]]the shamefaced bird. ‘My good sir,’ he says, ‘let me call your attention to the fact that you are a conceited nincompoop.’ ”
“He doesn’t call the bird Mr. Raven any more, now that he’s got hold of the cheese,” Emile observed.
“No; to call him that was all very well in the beginning; it flattered the bird. But now the fox makes fun of his dupe and calls him ‘my good sir’ in a tone of patronizing condolence. To express pity for those we have cajoled and deceived—is not that the very perfection of roguery? There we have, most assuredly, a fox that will make his way in the world. Read in La Fontaine, the incomparable story-teller, the abominable tricks Master Reynard plays later on the goat, the wolf, and many others; or, better, wait a while and we will read them together next winter before the open fire. For the present we will leave the raven of the fable and try to learn something about the real raven’s manner of living.
“Ravens do not flock together as crows do, but live alone or in pairs on rocky heights and in the tallest trees. The society or even the near neighborhood of its fellows is unbearable to a raven. With angry peckings it drives away from its chosen district any of its kind that may try to establish themselves there, even though they may have been born in the same nest. If the intruder is merely a bird of passage, it is conducted with menacing demonstrations to the frontiers of the domain and is jealously [[158]]watched until it disappears in the distance. Crows, social creatures, are treated in the same way. The raven asks to be left alone, quite alone, on its bare rock, and woe to the ill-advised intruder that disturbs its solitude! It builds its nest in the topmost branches of a solitary tree or, still more to its liking, in some fissure that offers itself in the perpendicular face of a rocky precipice. The nest is made of sticks and roots on the outside, and of moss, hair, rags, and fine grasses within.”
“I should like to know,” said Jules, “what ravens’ eggs are like.”
“Birds’ eggs are usually remarkable for their beauty, both in shape and in color; and for this reason, if for no other, they merit our attention. But it is no idle or merely ornamental accomplishment to be able to distinguish one from another, to know whether any given egg belongs to a useful species that should be respected or to a harmful species that should not be allowed to breed in the vicinity of our fields and gardens. With this end in view I have already told you the characteristic marks of the eggs of our principal birds of prey, some of which eggs should be destroyed without any consideration, while others should be protected. As this is a matter that interests you, I will continue in the same way and will describe the eggs of those birds that we are still to talk about.
“Know, then, that ravens’ eggs are much more beautifully colored than might be expected from the somber plumage of the bird. They are bluish green, [[159]]with brown spots. This background of bluish green, sometimes lighter and sometimes darker, occurs again, together with the brown spots, in the eggs of crows, magpies, jays, blackbirds, thrushes, and fieldfares, birds that resemble one another closely in their bodily structure, despite their marked differences in size, plumage, and habits. The eggs of certain blackbirds and fieldfares are of a magnificent sky-blue color.