. And
Blackie flew away, chuckling. He knew that, so far as that thrush was
concerned, there would be no desire to see any more fighting for some
time.

But, all the same, Blackie was not pleased. He was worked off his feet
providing rations for three ugly youngsters in a magnificently designed
and exquisitely worked and interwoven edifice, interlined with rigid
cement of mud, which we, in an off-hand manner, simply dismiss as "A
nest." The young were his children; they might have been
white-feathered angels with golden wings, by the value he put on them.
The thrush episode was only a portent, and not the first. He had no
trouble with the other feathered people he tolerated on his beat.

Blackie went straight to the lawn. (Jet and orange against deep green
was the picture.)

Now, if you and I had searched that dry lawn with magnifying-glasses,
in the heat of the sun, there and then, we should not have found a
single worm, not the hint or the ghost of one; yet that bird took three
long, low hops, made some quick motion with his beak--I swear it never
seemed to touch the ground, even, let alone dig---executed a kind of
jump in the air--some say he used his legs in the air--and there he was
with a great, big, writhing horror of a worm as big as a snake (some
snakes).

Thrushes bang their worms about to make them see sense and give in;
they do it many times. Blackie banged his giant only a little once or
twice, and then not savagely, like a thrush. Also, again, he may or
may not have used his feet. Moreover, he gave up two intervals to
surveying the world against any likely or unlikely stalking death. Yet
that worm shut up meekly in most unworm-like fashion, and Blackie cut
it up into pieces. The whole operation took nicely under sixty seconds.

Blackie gave no immediate explanation why he had reduced his worm to
sections. It did not seem usual. Instead, he eyed the hedge, eyed the
sky, eyed the surroundings. Nothing seemed immediately threatening,
and he hopped straight away about three yards, where instantly, he
conjured another and a smaller worm out of nowhere. With this
unfortunate horror he hopped back to the unnice scene of the first
worm's decease, and carved that second worm up in like manner. Then he
peeked up all the sections of both worms, packing them into his beak
somehow, and flew off. And the robin who was watching him didn't even
trouble to fly down to the spot and see if he had left