Chapter 2 | The Stolen Eggs | Featherland

Plenty of fine mornings came and went, and busier than ever were all the birds. Nests had been built; eggs had been laid; little callow birds had been hatched; and the little mouths wanted so much feeding that there was not even time to sing. But there was a good deal of discomfort and unpleasantry abroad, for a young relative of Spottleover the thrush had lost three or four eggs from his nest at the bottom of the garden. Of course they had been stolen, but who was the culprit? A chattering old sparrow said it was one of the rooks; and when the report got up in the rookery there was a fine commotion about it that evening, for the rooks held quite a parliament to vindicate the innocence of their order; and at last passed a vote of censure upon the sparrow for his false accusation; agreed to send him to Coventry; and, as one old rook said, it would have been much more to his credit to have had his shirt-front washed, for it was dreadfully dirty, than to have gone making the rooks out blacker than they really were. Then someone said it was the magpie; but he was dreadfully indignant about it, and his long tail trembled with passion; but he quite cleared his character before he flew back to his nest in the great elm down the field, for as he very truly said, if the case had been respecting a young bird or two, and times had been very hard, he might have fallen into temptation, and taken a callow nestling; “but as to eggs,” he said, laying a black paw upon his white waistcoat, “upon his honour, no, not even if they were new laid.”

And so the eggs kept going, and nobody knew where; for they all felt when the magpie said “Tar-tar,” and flew away, that he had spoken openly and honourably, and was not the thief. At last one evening, when all the birds were as busy as their old friends the bees, all of a sudden there was a complete full stop throughout the garden, for from one of the low branches of the great cedar someone suddenly shouted out in a full, loud, and distinct voice—“Cuckoo!” and again two or three times over—“Cuckoo!”

“Halloa!” said Flutethroat, ceasing his worm hunt, “who is that?”

“Cuckoo,” said Spottleover, dropping a snail; “what does that mean?”

And all through the garden there ran a thrill of excitement, for the thrush’s cousin flew up to the birds who had collected together, and told them he had seen the thief in the act of taking an egg, and he had flown into the cedar-tree. He was a long ugly bird in a striped waistcoat, and—

But the narrative was interrupted by the long mellow call of—

“Cuckoo!”

“What’s it mean?” chorused the birds.

“Oh, that’s his impudence,” said the old owl, winking and blinking, for he had been roused out of his sleep by the new call.

“Come now, that won’t do; we don’t want you meddling now, old mousetrap,” said the birds; “none of your night-birds here.” Saying which, they pecked and buffeted old Shoutnight to such a degree that he was glad to shuffle off to his hole behind the ivied chimney-stack.

All this while the cry kept coming out of the cedar, “Cuckoo! cuckoo!”

“It’s Dutch,” said a greenfinch, looking very knowing.

“No, it isn’t; he comes from Spain, I know,” said the goldfinch.

“Chiswick, Chiswick,” shouted the sparrow.

“Tchah,” said the jackdaw.

“Twit, twit,” said the nuthatch.

“Little bit o’ bread and no cheese,” said the yellowhammer.

“Ah, we’ll ‘twit’ him with his theft,” said the sage old starling; “and it’s neither bread nor cheese he’ll get here. He’s a thief; a cheat; a—”

“Quack, quack,” cried a duck from the pond.

“Ah! and a quack,” continued the starling, and then he grew so excited that the rest of his speech was lost in sputtering, chattering, and fizzing; and all the birds burst out laughing at him, for all his little sharp shining feathers were standing up all over his head, and he looked so comical that they could not contain themselves, but kept on tittering, till all of a sudden—

“Cuckoo!” said the stranger, and came right into view.

“He’s a foreigner,” shouted the birds; “give it him;” and away they went, mobbing the strange bird; flying at him, over him, under him, round and round him, darting in and out in all directions, and pecking him so sharply that he was obliged to make signs for mercy; when he was immediately taken into custody by the starlings, and made to go into a hole in the cedar, where a jackdaw kept watch while they made preparations for trying the thief.