Then there was a spreading of wings, as if all the silly flowers cut off by a great wind were flying away; gray, and white, and yellow, and mottled, a short flight, a rustling of leaves, and then quiet for five minutes.  But what minutes!  Fancy, if you can, that there was not one factory in the village, not a weaver or a blacksmith, and that the noise of men with their horses and cattle, spreading over the wide, distant plains, melted into the whispering of the breeze and was lost.  Mills were unknown, the roads were little frequented, the railroads were very far away.  Indeed, if the ravagers of his garden had repented for long the abbe would have fallen asleep of the silence over his breviary.

Fortunately, their return was prompt; a sparrow led the way, a jay followed, and then the whole swarm was back at work.  And the abbe could walk up and down, close his book or open it, and murmur:  “They’ll not leave me a berry this year!”

It made no difference; not a bird left his prey, any more than if the good abbe had been a cone-shaped pear-tree, with thick leaves, balancing himself on the gravel of the walk.

The birds know that those who complain take no action.  Every year they built their nests around the parsonage of St. Philemon in greater numbers than anywhere else.  The best places were quickly taken, the hollows in the trees, the holes in the walls, the forks of the apple-trees and the elms, and you could see a brown beak, like the point of a sword, sticking out of a wisp of straw between all the rafters of the roof.  One year, when all the places were taken, I suppose, a tomtit, in her embarrassment, spied the slit of the letter-box protected by its little roof, at the right of the parsonage gate.  She slipped in, was satisfied with the result of her explorations, and brought the materials to build a nest.  There was nothing she neglected that would make it warm, neither the feathers, nor the horsehair, nor the wool, nor even the scales of lichens that cover old wood.

One morning the housekeeper came in perfectly furious, carrying a paper.  She had found it under the laurel bush, at the foot of the garden.

“Look, sir, a paper, and dirty, too!  They are up to fine doings!”

“Who, Philomene?”

“Your miserable birds; all the birds that you let stay here!  Pretty soon they’ll be building their nests in your soup-tureens!”

“I haven’t but one.”

“Haven’t they got the idea of laying their eggs in your letter-box!  I opened it because the postman rang and that doesn’t happen every day.  It was full of straw and horsehair and spiders’ webs, with enough feathers to make a quilt, and, in the midst of all that, a beast that I didn’t see hissed at me like a viper!”

The abbe of St. Philemon began to laugh like a grandfather when he hears of a baby’s pranks.

“That must be a tomtit,” said he, “they are the only birds clever enough to think of it.  Be careful not to touch it, Philomene.”