BEFORE BREAKFAST.
"Ring the breakfast bell," cried Madam Towhee, "the sun is nearly up.
Rap on your tree, Mr. Flicker, and wake up the linnets."
"You are late yourself, Mrs. Towhee," said Mrs. Linnet; "my children
have had their breakfast already."
Mr. Flicker opened his sharp eyes and admired his sharp tail shafts.
Then he peeped from behind his tree and called out, "Mr. Mocker kept
me awake an hour in the night serenading young Mr. and Mrs. Sparrow.
That is why I slept so late."
[Illustration: Brown Towhee.]
Mr. Mocker, in the top of his house, rang the breakfast bell. It
sounded like the linnet and the towhee and the flicker and the robin
all together. The mocker laughed, too, like a dozen birds, keeping
his clapper going until the other people in the yard could scarcely
hear their own voices.
Up jumped little Mrs. Humming-bird and snatched a dewdrop from the
cup of a morning-glory on the trellis. "I prefer to drink distilled
water," she said, wiping her mouth.
"I like to drink from the hydrant," said Madam Linnet. "Any water
is good enough for me." Then she tilted herself on the top of the
hydrant and swallowed three drops as they fell from the pipe.
"What makes you always turn a somersault on the top of the hydrant?"
asked Mrs. Towhee. "It doesn't look polite to stoop over like that,
and drink with your head down."
"I don't drink with my mouth on the edge of the cup, like some people
I know," she said in reply to Mrs. Towhee. "Besides, it doesn't wet
my face' when the drops fall right into my mouth like this. I like to
turn upside down, too; it is good exercise for the muscles. What's
the use of a bird always being so proper?"
"Tut, tut!" said Mrs. Sparrow, "see how I drink." And she stood on
the edge of the puddle under the hydrant, and laid her breast in the
water, and drank, and drank, wetting her face and throat all over.
"I'm not afraid of a wetting," she said.
"What's all this talk about drinking?" asked old Mr. Butcher-bird,
coming down on the party with a swoop of his wings that scared all
the other birds back to the trees. "Don't run away," he said kindly.
"I've had my breakfast." Then he began to pull tatters of lizard meat
out of his bill.
"Where do you suppose I got that lizard?" he asked of a goldfinch.
"I have no idea," she answered. "I never saw a lizard up in the
morning so early as this. Lizards are 'sun birds' and don't like
cold, wet grass."
"Ha, ha!" laughed the butcher. "I caught him yesterday asleep, and
killed him, and pinned him on a thorn. I always get my breakfast
ready over night."
"I wish I had some wine to drink," observed Mr. Oriole, sadly. "The
doctor says I ought to drink wine, I feel so weak."
"What do you know about wine?" asked old Mr. Warbler, hopping along
where the birds were talking. "I tasted some wine once from a broken
bottle at the back door of a dram-shop, and it made me so dizzy
I couldn't fly. I had to stay on the shed roof all the morning,
feeling so foolish, and expecting to be caught by a cat any minute. I
wouldn't drink wine."
"I would, whole bottles of it," declared Mr. Oriole, laughing till he
almost cried. Then all the frightened birds came back to the hydrant.
"Too bad! too bad!" cried the warbler, wiping his eyes. "Young man,
you will be sorry. I wouldn't have anything to do with a doctor who
advised a young man to drink wine because he felt weak. Better go out
in the field to work."
"Ha, ha!" laughed the oriole again, amused at his own joke. "See me
tap my wine bottles." Then he flew to the berry patch and sipped
the red juice of the ripe raspberries, until his mouth and downy
moustache were all stained, the little winebibber.
"A pretty drinker you are," said the mocker; "give us a treat."
Then all the other birds fell to tapping the berry bottles, till a
lady came out of the house and cried, "Shoo!" flirting her gingham
apron at them and rattling her tin pail against the sunflower stalks
in a way that made the birds know she was in earnest. Then the lady
began filling her pail, while the birds watched her from behind the
leaves.
"Keep still," said Mr. Robin; "she'll never see them all. There'll be
plenty left. There are always more under the leaves. Let's go off to
the strawberry bed."
So the birds flew off to the strawberry bed on the other side of
the garden, and picked the ripe red side out of ever so many of the
berries. Then a man came out of the house and cried, "Shoo!" just as
the lady had done. But he did not begin to pick the berries. He stuck
a great ugly scarecrow up in the middle of the strawberry bed, and
laughed to himself as he thought how scared the birds would be when
they saw it.
But the birds, sitting in the trees, laughed too, and gay old Mr.
Mocker said, "He can't deceive us. We know a scarecrow from a man any
day."
As soon as the man's back was turned, the birds came down and
chattered in the scarecrow's face, and sat on the rim of his hat, and
wiped their bills on his coat sleeve, and made themselves very well
acquainted with him. All the while the man in the house was saying
to his daughter, "I guess those birds will let my strawberries alone
now."
[Illustration]