CHAPTER XIII - TEASING A SINGER
THOUGH there were many feathered folk
in Pleasant Valley, Jasper Jay did not care to have
much to do with any except his own family. Unless
he had other business that was more urgent he was
always ready to join a troop of noisy blue jays bent
on some mischief. But if there were none of his
own kind about, Jasper usually preferred to be alone.
Strangely enough, Jasper did not even
like to hear other birds singing. He claimed
that their voices were altogether too sweet.
“It’s sickening to hear
their songs,” he used to say. “Somebody
ought to put a stop to these concerts that we have
to listen to all summer long.” And he was
always telling people that what he liked was a good,
loud, jarring call, that you could hear without any
trouble. “These soft, musical notes are
all nonsense!” he declared.
Jasper held it to be his duty, whenever
he chanced to come across one of those forest concerts,
to seat himself in a nearby tree and make as much
noise as he could, in order to interrupt the singing.
Of course, such actions on the part
of Jasper Jay did not make the songsters of Pleasant
Valley like him any better. But Jasper never
minded that.
“I shall keep right on interrupting
these singing societies,” he said, “until
I’ve put an end to such nuisances.”
Naturally, that was only his way of
looking at such matters. As for the other birds,
they thought that the real nuisance was Jasper Jay.
Now, one of the finest singers in
the whole neighborhood was Buddy Brown-Thrasher.
Though he belonged to the Pleasant Valley Singing
Society, he sang so well that he usually preferred
to sing by himself, instead of attending a singing
party. Each morning and each evening he would
seat himself in the topmost branches of a tree near
the thicket where he lived; and there he would sing
his favorite song over and over again.
Often other birds some distance away
would cease their own music just to enjoy his, for
it was very beautiful. If a wooden Indian had
roamed through the woods where Buddy Brown-Thrasher
was singing, he would have stopped to listen.
Nobody could have helped doing that.
At least, nobody could have helped
listening except Jasper Jay. In his opinion,
Buddy Brown-Thrasher was the most annoying of all the
feathered songsters. He often went out of his
way to interrupt Buddy’s evening-song. (In the
morning Jasper was in too great a hurry for his breakfast
to trouble himself in any such fashion.)
Well, it is not surprising that Buddy
Brown-Thrasher should be upset by Jasper Jay’s
provoking visits. It is scarcely pleasant, when
you are singing your best notes in a tree-top, to
have them suddenly spoiled by a harsh jay, jay,
and to be mocked with boisterous laughter. The
time came at last when Buddy Brown-Thrasher said he
couldn’t stand it any longer.
“Something will have to be done!”
he declared. So he put on his thinking-cap at
once. Being a gentlemanly sort of person, he never
once thought of fighting Jasper Jay. But
he felt sure that there must be some way to teach
Jasper better manners. He knew, however, that
there was no use of trying to reason with the rude
fellow. If he had merely talked with Jasper,
and asked him if he wouldn’t please do differently,
Buddy Brown-Thrasher would have received no more than
a jeering shout in reply.
Naturally, he hoped for something
more satisfactory than that.