modesty that would not have disgraced the severest of British prudes, and giving me a great poke with her elbow she sent me tumbling from the branch with a vigor worthy of a railway baggageman.
I fell into a brake where a big wood-hen was sleeping. My mother herself, in her porringer, never wore such a beatific air. She was so plump, so rotund and comfortable, with her well-filled stomach and her fluffy feathers, that one would have taken her for a pâté from which the crust had been eaten off. I crept furtively up to her. "She won't wake up," I said to myself, "and even if she does, such a jolly, fat old lady can't help but be good-natured." She did not turn out as I expected, however. She lazily opened her eyes half-way, and heaving a faint sigh, said:
"You are crowding me, young fellow; clear out of here."
At the same instant I heard my name called; it was a band of thrushes up in the top of a mountain-ash who were making signals to me to come to them. "There are some charitable souls, at last," thought I. They made room for me, laughing as if they were crazy, and I slipped into the midst of the feathered group as expeditiously as ever you saw a billet-doux disappear in a muff. It soon became evident to me, however, that the ladies had been partaking of the fruit of the vine more liberally than was good for them; it was as much as they could do to keep themselves from falling off their perches, and their equivocal pleasantries, their uproarious bursts of laughter and their indecent songs compelled me to leave their company.
I was beginning to despair, and was about to search
