184 Birds Every Child Should Know 
bird we have. Suppose a fairy wished to 
pluck one for her dinner, as we should pluck a 
chicken; how large, do you think, would be 
the actual body of a hummingbird, without 
its feathers? Not much, if any, larger than 
a big bumble-bee, I venture to guess. Yet 
this atom of animation travels from Panama 
to Quebec or beyond, and back again every 
year of its brief life, that it may live where 
flowers, and the minute insects that infest them, 
will furnish drink and meat the year arotmd. 
So small a speck of a traveller cannot be seen 
in the sky by an enemy with the sharpest of 
eyes. Space quickly swallows it. A second 
after it has left your garden it will be out of 
sight. This mite of a migrant has plenty 
of stay-at-home relatives in the tropics — ex- 
quisite creatures they are — ^but the ruby-throat 
is the only hummingbird bold enough to venture 
into the eastern United States and Canada. 
What tempts him so far north? You know 
that certain flowers depend upon certain insect 
friends to carry their pollen from blossom to 
blossom that they may set fertile seed ; but did 
you know that certain other flowers depend 
upon the hummingbird ? Only his tongue, 
that may be run out beyond his long, slender 
bill and turned around curves, could reach the 
drops of nectar in the tips of the wild colum- 
bine’s five inverted horns of plenty. The 
