The king was in the parlor, Counting out his money; The queen was in the kitchen, Eating bread and honey; The maid was in the garden, Hanging out the clothes; There came a little blackbird, And snipped off her nose.

But the widow Broadnax seemed to be dozing among her cushions, and Miss Penelope felt it quite safe to go on with the softly uttered threats which scattered the small dark servitors, who were still flying about her like a flock of frightened blackbirds, although the basket was packed.

Pretty Ruth was chopping the mince, and singing so gaily as she worked that the four-and-twenty immortal blackbirds could not have put more music into a pie than she did.

In the course of the trip we saw, besides the species already named, great blue and little blue herons, pied-billed grebes, coots, cormorants, a flock of small sandpipers (on the wing), buzzards, vultures, fish-hawks, and innumerable red-winged blackbirds.

By him sat another Englishman, to whom the three tuneful Snowdon guides, their music-score upon their knees, sat listening approvingly, as he rolled out, with voice as of a jolly blackbird, or jollier monk of old, the good old Wessex song: "My dog he has his master's nose, To smell a knave through silken hose; If friends or honest men go by, Welcome, quoth my dog and I!

"Thrushes are not like other birds of passage which lay their eggs in particular places, as the swan does in the fields and the swallows under the roof, but they lay anywhere: for, despite their masculine name (turdus) there are female thrushes, just as there are male blackbirds, although they have a purely feminine name (merula).

The thrush is wisely placed on the summit of some lofty tree, that its loud and piercing notes may be softened by distance before they reach the ear; while the mellow blackbird seeks the inferior branches.

" She perched herself on her little horsehair trunk which she had packed to take to Blossy's, looking in her time-worn silk gown like a rusty blackbird, and, like a bird, she bent her head first to one side and then the other, surveying Abe in his "barrel clothes" with a critical but complimentary eye.

She heard neither the song of the wooing thrush, nor the cry of the startled blackbird, nor the evening hymn of the soaring lark.

Then I heard the sweet song of a meadow lark, and after that the melodious deep note of a swamp blackbird.

One adoring glance at the rosy little king, who sits with open mouth and spoon poised in air, staring in amazement at such unusual hilarity; one comprehensive glance at his wife, and the keen knife and fork pierce to the depth of the dainty dish, and the delicate blackbirds come forth; but they do not sing.

And as I looked out of the window and watched the vulgar blackbirds, with toes turned in, boring out their worms, I realized sharply that even they, as indeed everything large and small in the house and grounds, shared this strangeness, and were twisted out of normal appearance because of it.