"Yet there is one older than I. It is the salmon that swims in the Llyn stream. Inquire there."
So of the old mother salmon, Puck went to ask, and this was the answer which he received.
"Count all the spots on my body, and all the eggs in my roe—one for each year. Yet the blackbird is older even than I. Go listen to her story. She excels me, in both talk and fact."
And the blackbird opened its orange-colored bill, and answered proudly:
"Do you see this flinty rock, on which I am sitting? Once it was so huge that three hundred yoke of oxen could hardly move it. Yet, today, it hardly more than affords me room to roost on.
"What made it so small, do you ask?
"Well, all I have clone to wear it away, has been to wipe my beak on it, every night, before I go to sleep, and in the morning to brush it with the tips of my wing."
Even Puck, fairy though he was, was astonished at this. But the blackbird added:
"Go to the toad, that blinks its eye under the big rock yonder. His age is greater than mine."
The toad was half asleep when Puck came, but it opened with alertness, its beautiful round bright eyes, set in a rim of gold. Then Puck asked the question: "Oh, thou that carriest a jewel in thy head, are there any things alive that are older than thou art?"