In the hollow golden bowl of echoing evening the sailor noted, too, the
flicker, in golden pencilled wings and back of speckled umber and
mottled white breast, with coal-black collar and neck and head of
cinnamon. His golden tail droops far below his perch, and, running
downward along the tree-trunk, it flashes in the air like a sceptre over
the wood-lice he devours with his pickaxe bill. "Go to the ant, thou
sluggard!" was an instigation to murder in the flicker, who loves young
ants as much as wild-cherries or Indian corn, and is capable of taking
any such satire seriously upon things to eat. Not so elfin and devilish
as the small black woodpecker, he is full of bolder play.
The redbird, like the unclaimed blood of Abel, flew to the little trees
that grew low, as if to cover Abel's altar; the jack-snipe chirped in
the swampy spots, like a divinity student, on his clean, long legs,
probing with his bill and critical eye the Scriptures of the fields; the
quail piped like an old bachelor with family cares at last, as he led
his mate where the wild seeds were best; and through the air darted
voices of birds forsaken or on doctor's errands, crying "Phoebe?
Phoebe?" or "Killed he! killed he!"
"Are you a dealer?" asked the gentleman of Jimmy Phoebus.
"Just a little that way," said Jimmy, warily, "when I kin git somethin'
cheap."
The stranger had a pair of keen, dancing eyes, and a long, eloquent,
silver-gray face that might have suited a great general, so fine was
its command, and yet too narrowly dancing in the eyes, like spiders in a
well, disturbing the mirror there.
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