-you'll-come-down
method of the aeroplane; and he made the same sort of a hum. His
first-cousin, mechanically, was what we called the wind-up-the-watch
insect. This specimen possessed a watch-an old-fashioned Waterbury,
evidently-that he was continually winding. It must have been hard work
for the poor chap, for it sounded like a very big watch.

All these things were amusing. So were the birds. The African bird is
quite inclined to be didactic. He believes you need advice, and he means
to give it. To this end he repeats the same thing over and over until
he thinks you surely cannot misunderstand. One chap especially whom we
called the lawyer bird, and who lived in the treetops, had four phrases
to impart. He said them very deliberately, with due pause between each;
then he repeated them rapidly; finally he said them all over again with
an exasperated bearing-down emphasis. The joke of it is I cannot now
remember just how they went! Another feathered pedagogue was continually
warning us to go slow; very good advice near an African jungle.
"Poley-poley! Poley-poley!" he warned again and again; which is good
Swahili for "slowly! slowly!" We always minded him. There were many
others, equally impressed with their own wisdom, but the one I remember
with most amusement was a dilatory person who apparently never got
around to his job until near sunset. Evidently he had contracted to
deliver just so many warnings per diem; and invariably he got so busy
chasing insects, enjoying the sun, gossiping with a friend and generally
footling about that the late afternoon caught him unawares with never a
chirp accomplished. So he sat in a bush and said his say over and over
just as fast as he could without pause for breath or recreation. It was
really quite a feat. Just at dusk, after two hours of gabbling, he would
reach the end of his contracted number. With final relieved chirp he
ended.

It has been said that African birds are "songless." This is a careless
statement that can easily be read to mean that African birds are silent.
The writer evidently must have had in mind as a criterion some of our
own or the English great feathered soloists. Certainly the African
jungle seems to produce no individual performers as sustained as our own
bob-o-link, our hermit thrush, or even our common robin. But the African
birds are vocal enough, for all that. Some of them have a richness and
depth of timbre perhaps unequalled elsewhere. Of such is