The staff of the establishment gradually dwindled away. At last there was no one left to serve the Eagle and his mate but the vulture and the kite. In the background there remained, of course, a crowd of rooks, who multiplied at a pace that was perfectly disgraceful; and the faster they multiplied the more their arrears of taxes accumulated.
Finally the kite and vulture, having no one else to intrigue against (of course you don’t count the vulgar rooks), began to intrigue one against the other; and all on the ground of science. The vulture denounced the kite as reading the prayer-book in secret; and the kite invented against the vulture the slander that he kept the “New Song-Book” hidden in a hollow tree.
The Eagle began to grow uneasy.
But just at this moment an extraordinary thing happened. Finding themselves left without supervision, the rooks suddenly raised the question—
“By the by, what did the farthing alphabet say about all this?”
And, without stopping to remember clearly what was said, they all left their nests in a body and flew away.
The Eagle started off to pursue them, but it was no use; the indolent life he had been living had so enervated him that he could hardly flap his wings.
He returned to his mate, and uttered these words of wisdom—
“Be this a lesson to Eagles!”
But in what exactly the “lesson” consisted—whether it were that education is injurious to Eagles, or that Eagles are injurious to education, or, finally, that each is injurious to the other—that he never explained.