a limb, woods that were vast cathedrals too holy for the little singing birds. But on that day's journey the pine groves through which they passed were of comparatively small extent, so that soon they emerged from the dim, hushed cathedral places into a sunnier broad-leafed forest where the ground was sprinkled with blossoms and the foliage was alive with wings. Here the air throbbed with bird-music; troops of gray squirrels ran and leaped amid the wide-spreading branches; white-tailed deer, grazing in herds of a dozen or more, lifted their shapely heads to stand at gaze for a moment and then go bounding off along the winding, moss-tapestried forest aisles.
To Jolie it was as strange as it was beautiful. There had been birds in England, too, but never such birds as these. Now it was a crested cardinal, red as blood against a bank of lustrous laurel; now it was a gorgeous nonpareil, crimson and blue and shimmering yellow-green, glittering in the sun like a jewel of changing hues; now it was a ruby-throated hummingbird poised above a golden flower on wings that whirred so rapidly that the eye could not see them; now it was some tiny, fragile warbler from the tropical lands, in whose dazzling plumage all the tints of the sunrise seemed to have been imprisoned. All these delighted her; but stranger by far were the tall turkey cocks that she saw striding along the vistas of the woods to the right or to the left or ahead; and most strange and most lovely of all was a great flock of parrakeets that came screaming through the forest
