Half-way down the mountain we stopped about an hour at Mr. Barnard's
house for refreshments, and while we were sitting on the veranda looking
at the distant panorama of hills through a gap in the forest, we came
very near seeing a leopard kill a calf.--[It killed it the day before.]
--It is a wild place and lovely. From the woods all about came the songs
of birds,--among them the contributions of a couple of birds which I was
not then acquainted with: the brain-fever bird and the coppersmith. The
song of the brain-fever demon starts on a low but steadily rising key,
and is a spiral twist which augments in intensity and severity with each
added spiral, growing sharper and sharper, and more and more painful,
more and more agonizing, more and more maddening, intolerable,
unendurable, as it bores deeper and deeper and deeper into the listener's
brain, until at last the brain fever comes as a relief and the man dies.
I am bringing some of these birds home to America. They will be a great
curiosity there, and it is believed that in our climate they will
multiply like rabbits.
The coppersmith bird's note at a certain distance away has the ring of a
sledge on granite; at a certain other distance the hammering has a more
metallic ring, and you might think that the bird was mending a copper
kettle; at another distance it has a more woodeny thump, but it is a
thump that is full of energy, and sounds just like starting a bung.
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