My hand reached for a stone to throw at him when happened the second
thing. There came a gentle pat upon the woodland floor, and from a
tree overhead dropped down another living plant like to the one above
yet not exactly similar, a male, my instincts told me, in full solitary
blossom like her above, cinctured with leaves, and supported by half
a score of thick white roots that worked, as I looked, like the limbs
of a crab. In a twinkling that parti-coloured gentleman vegetable
near me was off to the stem upon which grew his lady love; running
and scrambling, dragging the finery of his tasselled petals behind,
it was laughable to watch his eagerness. He got a grip of the tree
and up he went, "hand over hand," root over root. I had just time to
note others of his species had dropped here and there upon the ground,
and were hurrying with frantic haste to the same destination when he
reached the fatal branch, and was straddling victoriously down it,
blind to all but love and longing. That ill-omened bird who stood
above the maiden-flower let him come within a stalk's length, so near
that the white splendour of his sleeping lady gleamed within arms'
reach, then the great beak was opened, the great claws made a clutch,
the gallant's head was yanked from his neck, and as it went tumbling
down the maw of the feathered thing his white legs fell spinning through
space, and lay knotting themselves in agony upon the ground for a minute
or two before they relaxed and became flaccid in the repose of death.
Another and another vegetable suitor made for that fatal tryst, and as
each came up the snap of the brown bird's beak was all their obsequies.
At last no more came, and then that Nemesis of claws and quills walked
over to the girl-flower, his stomach feathers ruffled with repletion,
the green blood of her lovers dripping from his claws, and pulled her
golden heart out, tore her white limbs one from the other, and swallowed
her piecemeal before my very eyes! Then up in wrath I jumped and yelled
at him till the woods echoed, but too late to stay his sacrilege.