From the monotone of under-world sounds a strange little rasping detached itself, a reiterated, subdued scraping or picking. It carried my mind instantly to the throbbing theme of the Niebelungs, onomatopoetic of the little hammers forever busy in their underground work. I circled a small bush at my side, and found that the sound came from one of the branches near the top; so with my glasses I began a systematic search. It was at this propitious moment, when I was relaxed in every muscle, steeped in the quiet of this hillside, and keen on discovering the beetle, that the first shell arrived. If I had been less absorbed I might have heard some distant chattering or calling, but this time it was as if a Spad had shut off its power, volplaned, kept ahead of its own sound waves, and bombed me. All that actually happened was that a band of little parrakeets flew down and alighted nearby. When I discovered this, it seemed a disconcerting anti-climax, just as one can make the bravest man who has been under rifle-fire flinch by spinning a match swiftly past his ear. I have heard this sound of parrakeet's wings, when the birds were alighting nearby, half a dozen times; but after half a hundred I shall duck just as spontaneously, and for a few seconds stand just as immobile with astonishment. From a volcano I expect deep and sinister sounds; when I watch great breakers I would marvel only if the accompanying roar were absent; but on a calm sunny August day I do not expect a noise which, for suddenness and startling character, can be compared only with a tremendous flash of lightning. Imagine a wonderful tapestry of strong ancient stuff, which had only been woven, never torn, and think of this suddenly ripped from top to bottom by some sinister, irresistible force. In the instant that the sound began, it ceased; there was no echo, no bell-like sustained overtones; both ends were buried in silence. As it came to-day it was a high tearing crash which shattered silence as a Very light destroys darkness; and at its cessation I looked up and saw twenty little green figures gazing intently down at me, from so small a sapling that their addition almost doubled the foliage. That their small wings could wring such a sound from the fabric of the air was unbelievable. At my first movement, the flock leaped forth, and if their wings made even a rustle, it was wholly drowned in the chorus of chattering cries which poured forth unceasingly as the little band swept up and around the sky circle. As an alighting morpho butterfly dazzles the eyes with a final flash of his blazing azure before vanishing behind the leaves and fungi of his lower surface, so parrakeets change from screaming motes in the heavens to silence, and then to a hurtling, roaring boomerang, whose amazing unexpectedness would distract the most dangerous eyes from the little motionless leaf-figures in a neighboring treetop.