Against the wall beyond the door was a long, broad table, or rather counter, and upon it was a village of small houses, rows upon rows of them. Outside of the village and the streets were other and larger houses, in groups of two and three, with dooryards and gardens, and then came half a dozen farm-houses surrounded by fields and gardens. In the village there were stores and a Court House, and a Clerk's Office and a Jail, surrounded by a Public Square, exactly like that at Powhatan Court House, and two taverns with signs hanging outside of them. Trees lined the streets, and vines were running over the houses. Then, there were wells, and wood-piles with men chopping wood at them, and cow-pens with cows and calves, and pig-pens filled with pigs. Men were driving wagons along the roads, and a fine carriage with four horses harnessed to it and a coachman on the box stood before the larger of the two taverns. The footman, hat in hand, was helping two elegantly dressed ladies out of the carriage, and the landlady, with two colored maids behind her, was upon the portico waiting to receive them. Men were digging in the corn and tobacco fields; there were turkeys, chickens, ducks, and geese, and boys riding horses to water and driving the cows home to be milked.
Was ever such another Wonderland revealed to a child who had never been in a toy-shop and never owned a doll that was not home-made?
I screamed and capered with joy, like the crazy thing I was, for a whole minute after my eyes fell upon the mimic settlement. Then I fell to examining the "entertainment" more closely, and discovered that everything, except the mosses that imitated the trees, vines, and other growing things, was made of corn-stalks and corn-husks—"shucks" as Virginians call them. The human creatures and the dumb animals were carved out of the firm, dried pith of the stalks, and afterward painted with water colors. The clothes of men and women were made of the soft inner shucks, dried carefully to the pliability of silk. Log and frame houses were built of the canes themselves; the smallest were used whole, the larger were split. Peeping into the open doors and windows I saw that each house was furnished with beds, tables, and chairs, also made of corn-stalks, pith, and shucks.
At the far end of the counter were six bird-cages, constructed of thin strips of corn-canes, each supplied with perches and water vessels.
"Those are my reform prisons," Madam Leigh said to my cousins, who had followed and begged to be let in. "You see,"—to me,—"when one of my hummers becomes cross or quarrelsome, I separate him from the rest and shut him up in one of these cages until he is in a better humor. I am sorry to say that they have pretty peppery tempers, and hardly a day passes in which I do not have to interfere to stop their fighting."
I had no reason to feel myself slighted now. She went all round the room with me, showing her pets and telling me interesting stories of their habits and dispositions. Each had a name, and some answered to their names when she called them. At least, she thought that they did, and I did not doubt it when I saw them swoop down to dip their bills in the flowers she held up, as she called "Sprite" and "Bright," and "Sweet" and "Swift," and the like crisp, short names in a voice that was like the tinkle of a little bell. It was a pretty sight,—the tiny woman, all white from cap to toe, standing in the full tide of sunbeams, bunches of honeysuckle and catalpa flowers, half as big as herself, in her arms, the elf-like face smiling out of them at the eagerness of her feathered darlings, darting and glancing and gleaming and humming about her, as if she had been a larger edition of themselves, and not of a different genus. She made me stand by her while this was going on, saying that the hummers were "too well-bred to be afraid of her friends, and were especially fond of little people."
"The honeysuckles first made me think of collecting them," went on the pleasant tinkle. "When they are in full bloom the frisky little creatures swarm in them all day long. They like white and yellow jessamine, too, and catalpa flowers and lilies and acacia blossoms. Ten years ago I found one of their nests upon a low limb of a tulip-poplar tree. Here it is! It looks like a knob of mossy bark, you see. There were two eggs in it. I cut off the limb carefully, and set it in a pot of water in this room. It was full of blossoms, and the water kept these alive. The window was left open and nobody—not even myself—came in here for a week. As I had hoped, the mother and father bird found the nest, and went on sitting on the eggs as if it had not been moved. One night, after the baby birds were hatched, I went softly to the outside of the window and let down the sash. That was the beginning of my aviary. That's a hard word for you—isn't it, Molly? It means a family of birds, such as I have here."
"I don't believe there is another like it in the world," said Cousin Molly Belle. "I've always declared that you are a fairy, and charm your hummers. I described it and them once to a famous ornithologist. That's a real jaw-breaker, Namesake, and means one who knows everything about all sorts of birds—or thinks he does. I met this or-nith-ol-o-gist in New York last May. He said it was impossible to tame and raise families of wild birds, especially humming-birds. And when I said I had seen it with my own eyes, times without number, he looked polite—and unbelieving."
Madam Leigh was so much amused that the flowers shook in her shrivelled mites of hands.
"Many learnèd strangers have been to see the 'impossibility,'" she said, her voice shaken by laughter.