The first victim of the new tendency of affairs was the woodpecker. Indeed, indeed the poor bird was not guilty; but he knew how to read and write, and that was quite sufficient ground for an accusation.
“Do you know the rules of punctuation?”
“Not only the rules of ordinary punctuation, but even those for extra signs, such as quotation marks, hyphens, parentheses; on my conscience, I always put them right.”
“And can you distinguish the feminine from the masculine gender?”
“I can. I should not make a mistake, even by night.”
And that was all. The woodpecker was chained and placed in solitary confinement for life in a hollow tree. On the next day, being devoured by ants, he gave up the ghost in his prison. His sorrows were hardly over when the thunderbolt fell on the Academy of Science.
The owls and night-jars, however, defended themselves sturdily; they did not wish to be evicted from their cosy free quarters. They said that they followed scientific pursuits, not in order to popularise science, but to protect it from the evil eye. But the kite instantly demolished their arguments by asking—
“What’s the use of having science at all?”
This being an unexpected question, they could give no answer. They were then separated and sold to market-gardeners, who killed and stuffed them and set them up in their nurseries for scarecrows. The farthing alphabets were next taken away from the baby rooks, and mashed up in a mortar, to form a homogeneous mass of pulp, which was then made into playing-cards.
Matters grew worse and worse. After the owls and the night-jars came the turn of the starlings; then the corn-crakes, parrots, and finches. Even the deaf heath-cock was suspected of “a certain way of thinking,” on the ground that he held his tongue all day and slept all night.