But at first the Ugly Duckling had a baddish time of it. He was bitten, pushed about, and made game of, not only by the ducks, but by the hens. They all declared he was much too big, and fancied himself too much. He certainly was not graceful, and he had a cocky, self-assertive air which irritated the Conservative Old Cockalorums. He was always making unexpected and unducklike sorties, "alarums and excursions," and lifting up his raucus-caucus voice against the time-honoured rules and respectable conventions of the duck-pond. So much so, that they nicknamed him the "Daring Duckling," and prophesied that he would come to a bad end.
So he ran away, and flew over the palings.
* * *
He had many adventures, and various. He dwelt for a time with a lot of wild ducks in a marsh, and even struck up a sort of friendship for a swarm of wild geese, who wanted to do away with domestication and destroy the "tame villatic" tendencies of gregarious goosedom, and abolish barn-yards and duck-ponds, peacocks, and game-fowls, and guinea-hens, and poulterer's shops, and pâté de foie gras, and other checks on liberty and incentives to luxury. But somehow he didn't get on with the wild ducks for long. He was so much wilder than they, and wanted his own way too much and too often for the old and recognised leaders of their flocks. And as to the wild geese, why he soon lost sympathy with their "revolutionary programmes" and "subversive schemes," which he learned to regard indeed as a sort of wild goose chase, and deride and denounce as vehemently as he had aforetime praised them.
"I think I'll take my chance, and go abroad into the wide world," said the Duckling.
* * *
One evening, just as the sun was setting, there came a whole flock of beautiful large birds from a grove. The Ugly Duckling had never seen any so lovely before. They were dazzlingly white, with long graceful necks: they were swans. They uttered a peculiar cry, and then spread their magnificent wings and away they flew from this cold country to warmer lands across the open sea, as was their usual custom. They rose so high that the Ugly Duckling felt a strange sensation come over him, a sort of delicious vertigo. He turned round and round in the water like a wheel, stretched his neck up into the air toward them, and uttered so loud and strange a cry that he was frightened at it himself. Oh! never could he again forget those beautiful, happy birds, so gracefully fleeting against a primrose sky. He knew not how those birds were called, nor whither they were bound, but he felt an affection for them, such as he had never yet experienced for any living creature. And he more and more lost love for, and patience with, all his old associates, ducks or geese, wild or domesticated.
* * *
The Ugly Duckling now felt able to flap his wings. They rustled much louder than before, and bore him away most sturdily; and before long he found himself in a noble park, a nobleman's park; indeed, the dainty demesne of one of those who "toil not neither do they spin." It was quite Beaconsfieldian in its beauty, with its smooth emerald sward and umbrageous elm-avenues, its dusky cedar clumps and tail-spreading, crest-sunning peacocks.
"Dear me!" mused the Ugly Duckling. "It is strange, but I feel quite at home here!!!"