110 BEAUTIFUL GIRDS 
wings are moving so quickly, they make a humming 
sound, just as a top does when it is spinning very fast, 
which is why we call them Humming-birds, just 
as we call tops that hum very much, humming-tops. 
We have named the Humming-birds from the 
sound they make when they fly, and the Indians from 
their bright radiance and the speed at which they dart 
about. Itis from flower to flower that they dart, and 
whilst you are looking at one sunbeam that is dancing 
about one flower, all at once there is a ray of light 
through the air, and another sunbeam is dancing about 
another flower. That is what it looks like, only, 
really, it is the same sunbeam that has flown from 
one flower to another. 
Sometimes when you are walking in the garden in 
England and looking at the geraniumsin your flower- 
beds, you will see a little brown moth hovering over 
one of them, and putting a long, slender thread-like 
thing that we call a proboscis (though we call an 
elephant’s trunk a proboscis too) right down into the 
centre of the flower. His wings move so fast that 
you can hardly see them, and in a second or two he 
will dart away too, so quickly that you only know he 
is gone, and then, all of a sudden, you will see him 
again, hovering over another geranium and probing it 
with his wonderful, long, thin proboscis. It is a 
tube, that proboscis, and through it, the moth is 
