Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/474

 summer land; and utter, unredeemed ruin is the goal towards which many of the proprietors have perforce turned their eyes these many weary months past.

The fair but fleeting promise of the bygone month has been unredeemed. Only a few days of the threatening sun have sufficed to wither the tender herbage, the springing plantlets which essayed to cover the baked soil. The broad road seems that veritable way to Avernus, so bare, sun-scorched, adust is it, for hundreds of leagues. Far away one may note its swaying deflections, and hold a parallel course, guided solely by the well-nigh continuous dust-line of the waggon-trains.

Yet, maugre the terrors of the time, certain feathered inhabitants have their provision secured to them. How else trip and flit from myall twig to pine bough, bright-eyed and fearless, this pair of delicious tiny doves? The most exquisitely formed and delicately lovely of all the Columba family, they are, perhaps, the smallest—not larger than the brown bush-quail. Not half the size of the crested pigeon, there is a family resemblance in the fairy pink legs, the pointed tail, the bronze bars of the wing-feathers, the tones of the soft, azure breast. By no means a shy bird, as if conscious that few fowlers could be cruel to the hurt of so delicate a thing of beauty, so rare a feathered gem, in these stern solitudes.

Not that all the tribes of the air can be described as beautiful and harmless. Riding slowly through a belt of timber, musing, it may be, on the undeserved sorrows of the lower animals, I am suddenly and violently assaulted—'bonneted,' as the humorous youth of the period has it. I clutch my hat just in time to save it from being knocked off. There are two round holes near the brim, which I had not previously observed, and a cock magpie is flying back to his station on a tree hard by, much satisfied in his mind. It is a well-known habit of this bold, aggressive bird in the breeding season. He keeps watch, apparently, the live-long day, hard by the nest, and, pledged to drive away intruders, is no respecter of persons. Long years since, the present writer was similarly attacked; when essaying to lift his hat some hours afterwards, and finding resistance, he discovered that the bird's beak had penetrated the felt and inflicted a smart cut. Blood had actually been shed, and, having dried, caused adhesion. The