30 BEAUTIFUL BIRDS 
It would take you weeks to go in a steamer to 
where the Birds of Paradise live, and if you were to 
go, not in a steamer but in a ship with sails, it would 
take you longer still. But when you got there you 
would not see the Birds of Paradise flying all about, ~ 
as soon as you went ashore out of the ship or the 
steamer, as you would see sparrows here. Oh no, 
Birds of Paradise are not so common as that, even 
in their own country. They do not come into the 
towns, like sparrows, either, but live in the great 
forests where people do not often go, and even when 
one does go into them, it is difficult to see them 
amongst the great tall trees and the broad-fronded 
ferns and the long, hanging creepers that make a’ 
tangle from one tree to another. 
Ah, those are wonderful forests, those forests far 
away over the seas! Some of the trees have trunks so 
thick that a dozen men—or perhaps twenty—would 
not be able to circle them round by joining their 
hands together, and so tall that when you looked up 
you would not be able to see their tops. They 
would go shooting up and up like the spires of great 
cathedrals, till at last they would be lost in a green 
sky, not the real sky, the blue one—that would be 
higher up still—but a green sky of leaves made by 
all the trees themselves, and in this sky of leaves 
there would be flower-stars almost as bright and as 
