e all they please and can.

Startled at their approach, a bird like a huge mackaw bounced from the
boughs of the trees, and sped away, every now and then upon the ground,
toward the shelter of the forest, fluttering and hopping close by the
side of the little brook which, emerging from the forest, winds into the
glen, and beside the course of which Sir Bale and Philip Feltram had
ascended from the margin of the lake.

It fluttered on, as if one of its wings were hurt, and kept hopping and
bobbing and flying along the grass at its swiftest, screaming all the
time discordantly.

"That must be old Mrs. Amerald's bird, that got away a week ago," said
Sir Bale, stopping and looking after it. "Was not it a mackaw?"

"No," said Feltram; "that was a gray parrot; but there are stranger
birds in Cloostedd Forest, for my ancestors collected all that would
live in our climate, and were at pains to find them the food and shelter
they were accustomed to until they grew hardy--that is how it happens."

"By Jove, that's a secret worth knowing," said Sir Bale. "That would
make quite a feature. What a fat brute that bird was! and green and
dusky-crimson and yellow; but its head is white--age, I suspect; and
what a broken beak--hideous bird! splendid plumage; something between a
mackaw and a vulture."

Sir Bale spoke jocularly, but with the interest of a bird-fancier; a
taste which, when young, he had indulged; and for the moment forgot his
cares and the object of his unwonted excursion.

A moment after, a lank slim bird, perfectly white, started from the same
boughs, and winged its way to the forest.

"A kite, I think; but its body is a little too long, isn't it?" said Sir
Bale again, stopping and looking after its flight also.

"A foreign kite, I daresay?" said Feltram.

All this time there was hopping near them a jay, with the tameness of a
bird accustomed to these solitudes. It peered over its slender wing
curiously at the visitors; pecking here and nodding there; and thus
hopping, it made a circle round them more than once. Then it fluttered
up, and perched on a bough of the old oak, from the deep labyrinth of
whose branches the other birds had emerged; and from thence it flew down
and lighted on the broad druidic stone, that stood like a cyclopean
table on its sunken stone props, before the snakelike roots of the oak.

Across this it hopped conceitedly, as over a stage on which it figured
becomingly; and after a momentar