156 Bird -Lore 



jar, hardly big enough to hold him, and run his beak around the crack of the 

 lid, vainly trying to open it. 



The trick I found the hardest to forgive him was the destruction of some 

 of mv house plants. With great pains I had constructed a flower-stand I 

 had seen described in some magazine, the basis of the affair being, I think, an 

 old wash-stand and a couple of tin basins. It was fearfully and wonderfully 

 made and I was vastly proud of it. Fancy my feelings when I came in one 

 day and found everything a complete wreck, and King Cole seated on the 

 top of all, surveying his work of destruction and talking softly to himself 

 with an air of complete satisfaction. He had pulled up every geranium 

 plant, stripped of¥ all the leaves, and had laid the stalks in regular rows on 

 the window-sill. The little yellow blossoms of a trailing plant were scattered 

 far and wide about the room, some even on the mantel and the book-shelves, 

 so that he must have carried them in his beak and laid them there; not a 

 single blossom was left on the plant, and it had been very full of bloom. 

 When the villain saw me, he gave a scream of fright and, scrambling out of 

 the debris, flew out of the window and away, and did not return for several 

 days. 



We owned a clever little rat -terrier called 'Nettle,' at that time, but, com- 

 pared with the wisdom of King Cole, Nettle's sagacity sank into insignifi- 

 cance. To tease her and a melancholy old cat who was then ten, and who 

 lived to be seventeen years old, whom we called 'Mawther Gummidge,' was 

 King Cole's greatest delight. He always went to work in precisely the 

 same way. He would waylay Mawther, and, ambling gravely after her, nip her 

 daintily on the joint of one of her hind legs. Mawther had learned to protect 

 her caudal appendage from these rear attacks, so he was forced to open 

 hostilities upon her leg. She was usually too deeply sunk in apathy to take 

 to her heels at once and put herself beyond his reach, but would turn upon 

 him with a look of deep reproach, whereupon he would rush violently at her 

 nose. To protect that weather-beaten feature, poor Mawther would quickly 

 turn about again, and so would catch it once more on the leg, only this time 

 the tweak would be a hard one. This had the effect of rousing her meek 

 spirit, and a very one-sided combat would follow. Puss getting much the worst 

 of the battle. After putting her to rout. King Cole would fly upon the win- 

 dow-sill and mock his retiring foe by as good an imitation of her 'meows' 

 as he was able to give. In time he became a very fair mimic ; he could 

 'cluck' like a hen, gabble and hiss like geese, and if several people were 

 talking together in his hearing he would retire to another room and there 

 imitate them by uttering a succession of guttural sounds in different notes 

 precisely like the voices of two or more persons conversing in low tones. 



Nettle and King Cole were the best of friends, and, when the Crow was 

 not in his mischievous mood, they would play together by the hour. Nettle 

 bore his teasing more good-naturedly than did the misanthropic Mawther, 



