She started and pressed the honest country fists more firmly than beseems a chatelaine. But she quickly let go Von Prell's freckled hand, which was still well kept.
"Thank the Lord, he won't betray us," she thought.
The finches were the maddest of all. The titmice, too, made a racket, and so did the nuthatches, and the blackbirds behaved as if they were lords of the place, while the stay-at-home starlings formed in groups among themselves and paid no attention to the rest of the world. Beside, there were the hedge-sparrows and wrens, who added a fair share to the chorus. But the fanfare of the finches was too much for ears accustomed to the tiny twittering of a caged canary.
Old Haberland knew them all. Old Haberland was the gardener, who pottered about in felt shoes and lived, in a measure, from the colonel's bounty, since he held sway now over nothing but the lawn sprinkler. He knew which birds nested on the ground and which in the branches. He knew the time each began to sing and the best place to stand if you wanted to study their plumage and habits.
It was terrible to think that the squirrels had to be shot. Lilly almost hated the old man when he sallied forth, his pea-rifle under his jacket, with evil intent against the jolly little marauders--Haberland maintained the vermin recognised his gun and scurried off when they saw it. The magpies and jays were no friends of his, either. His love was the shy, green woodpecker, whom he had actually coaxed into nesting in the park. And that gay marvel of a bird, the hoopoe, came without fear at any hour of the day to the back of the castle, where it sang its hututu and transfixed the insects in the grass with its curved sabre of a bill.
Those were mornings full of glow and brilliance, such as could not have been since the creation of the world.
When you opened the door at five o'clock in the morning the cool purple mist crept in and folded itself about your body like a royal mantle. On the pond, where the reeds rose up over night, pushed by underground powers, lay sunlit vapours, which gradually lifted and ascended heavenward. Everything steamed. Sometimes white lights seemed to have been kindled on the lawn, and the little clouds in evaporating rolled heavily from the glistening campions, as though surfeited with the dew they had drunk.