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re little human beings, but in this book such language is used only to the very minimum, just enough to make the animals' activities meaningful. For the rest the birds mostly make their appointed noises. But I did enjoy the skylark's song. And once Fenn had put in one song it was inevitable that he would put in another, for which the bluebottle was the "singer". NH
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FEATHERLAND; OR, HOW THE BIRDS LIVED AT GREENLAWN, BY GEORGE MANVILLE FENN.
CHAPTER ONE.
HOW SPRING WAS COMING.
"Hallo, old Yellowbill! what's brought you out so early?" said a fine fat thrush, one bright spring morning, stopping for a moment to look at his companion, and leaving the great broken-shelled snail he had rooted out of the ivy bush curling about upon the gravel path. "Hallo, old Yellowbill! what's brought you out so early?"
"What's that to you, old snail-crusher?" said the blackbird, for he was in rather an ill temper that morning, through having had a fright in the night, and being woke up by old Shoutnight the owl, who had been out mousing and lost his wife, and sat at last in the ivy-tod halloaing and hoo-hooing, till the gardener's wife threw her husband's old boot out of the window at him, when he went flop into the laurel bush, and banged and bounced about, hissing and snapping with his great bill, while his goggle eyes glowed so angrily that the blackbird's good lady popped off her nest in a hurry and broke one of her eggs, and, what was worse, was afraid to go back again till the eggs were nearly cold; and then she was so cross about it, that although the broken egg was only a bad one, she turned round upon Flutethroat, her husband, who had been almost frightened to death, and told him in a pet it was all his fault for not picking out a better place for the nest.
So it was no wonder that Flutethroat, the blackbird, turned grumpy