"On the juices of flowers and small insects. Look! there is one hovering, and its wings are moving too fast for us to see them. Don't stir! I see a branch so covered with blue flowers that it can hardly fail to attract the bird. Now it is settled above one of the corollas, and plunges its head into it without ceasing to beat with its wings. Its cloven tongue soon sucks out the honey concealed in the flower, and its little ones will greet it when it gets back with open beaks to receive their share of the spoil."
"They are funny birds, those," said l'Encuerado to Lucien. "In three months—that is, in October—they will go to sleep, and will not wake up till April."
"Is that true, father?"
"I rather fancy that they migrate."
"And the Indian went away, saluting."
"Now don't teach Chanito wrongly," said l'Encuerado, repeating a common phrase of mine; "the huitzitzilins do not migrate; they go to sleep."
"This fact has been so often related to me by Indians living in the woods," said my friend, "that I feel almost disposed to believe it."
"Don't they say the same of the bats and swallows? and yet we know they change their habitat."
"Yes; but with regard to humming-birds, they assert that they have seen them asleep. At all events, it is certain that they disappear in the winter."