larger than a man. Just before it was hidden, the light of the rising sun smote over the edge of the downs and touched its wings, and they flashed with the brightness of flames and the colour of precious stones, and so passed, leaving the witness agape.
A ploughman going to his work, along under the stone wall of Siddermorton Park, saw the Strange Bird flash over him for a moment and vanish among the hazy interstices of the beeches. But he saw little of the colour of the wings, witnessing only that its legs, which were long, seemed pink and bare like naked flesh, and its body mottled white. It smote like an arrow through the air and was gone.
These were the first three eye-witnesses of the Strange Bird.
Now in these days one does not cower before the devil and one's own sinfulness, or see strange iridescent wings in the light of dawn and say nothing of it afterwards. The young solicitor's clerk told his mother and sisters at breakfast, and afterwards on his way to the office at Portburdock, spoke of it to the blacksmith of Hammerpond, and spent the morning with his fellow clerks marvelling instead of copying deeds. And Sandy Bright went to talk the matter over with Mr. Jekyll, the "Primitive" minister, and the ploughman told old Hugh and afterwards the Vicar of Siddermorton.
"They are not an imaginative race about here," said the Vicar of Siddermorton, "I wonder how much of that was true. Barring that he thinks the wings were brown it sounds uncommonly like a Flamingo."
124
