A multitude of birds of many kinds make this grove their abode. There the quarrelsome jay fights with one of its own species for the possession of a beechnut; there the magpie chatters on a high branch and then flies down and alights in a neighboring field, jerking up its tail and looking around with an air of defiance; crows have their evening rendezvous there; and there the woodpecker hammers away at old bark to make the insects come out so that it may snap them up with its viscous tongue. Listen to the bird at its work: toc, toc, toc! If it is interrupted in its task it flies away with a cry of teo, teo, teo, repeated thirty or forty times in quick succession and resembling a noisy burst of laughter. “What bird is it that seems to be making fun of us with such loud laughter as it flies off?” Emile and Jules asked each other one day when they were watching from their window the woodpeckers and the jays at play in the branches of the old beech-trees. Jacques, their uncle’s gardener, heard them as he was watering the cabbage bed. After finishing a series of little trenches to carry the water to all parts of the bed, he came up to the window for a talk with the boys. “That bird you see there,” said he, “with green plumage and a red head, is a woodpecker. It has several different cries. If it is going to rain it says plieu, plieu, in a long-drawn and plaintive tone. When at work, in order to keep up its spirits it every now and then gives a harsh cry, tiackackan, tiackackan, so that the whole forest echoes with it. In the nesting season it gives a quick teo, teo, teo, just like what you heard a moment ago.” “Then it has its nest now in the beech grove?” asked Jules. “It is at work on it, for all the morning I’ve heard it hammering away with all its might. You see, it makes its nest in a hole that it hollows out by pecking the trunk of a tree with its beak. It’s a fine beak it has, too, so hard and pointed that the bird is always afraid of going too deep into the wood. So after two or three good hard pecks it skips round to the other side of the trunk to see if it hasn’t bored clear through.” “Bah! you’re only in fun,” returned Jules. “Not at all,” protested Jacques; “it’s what I’ve heard said, and I’ve often seen the woodpecker hurry round to look at the other side of the trunk.” “But the bird must have some other reason than just to see whether or not the tree is bored through. I’m going to ask Uncle.” “Ask him, too, if he knows the ironweed that the woodpecker rubs its beak on to make it harder than steel.” “Your ironweed sounds to me like a fairy tale.”