"Luck to you, O Golden-Wings!" I cried. "For already you have taught me a lesson for Life. Let us keep _above_ our enemies if we would be safe, not beneath them—for there we are a prey to their talons, besmirched with dirt; nor on their level, for there we are no better than they; but _above_ them where they cannot reach us, and where we may go on to our destiny with only the sunlight around us and the unseen stars above." The birds dropped down, baffled, to rest in the top of a sugar-maple tree. Like all poets, in losing their game they had lost their temper, and now between panting and hard breathing they could be heard quarreling. "It was you," said the wife, "you conceited thing; it is all your fault! I had him once if you had let me alone." "Oh, you had him, did you," sneered the mate; "if your talents only equaled your tongue you would be better off!" They almost spat upon each other; they were beaten and angry and they took it out that way. Golden-Wings was safe. He was high up in the air. His very flight was now the flight of victory. Twenty yards more and he would drop down into the great splotch of green below where his wife was waiting him on the blossom of a wild cherry. I was about to cheer him with the silent approval of true applause when I saw a lightning bolt of red drop from the jagged bar of the dead limb of a great oak near by, in the midst of the forest and high above the weary, yet happy Golden-Wings. I paled at the sight, for I knew that no butterfly would ever escape this new-comer. Even Golden-Wings recognized his fate, and, paralyzed with fear, stopped his flight in mid-air in a few yards of his home, and lay quivering in hopeless fear. Well he might, for the red and white bolt was a red-headed woodpecker, a very king in the tribe of the flycatchers. Often I had seen him poise above an air-bound moth, then drop like a dead bird in the air and no moth would be there. The hand of the world is against the marauder, be he bird or man. But they revere the man who robs by rule. Straight at Golden-Wings he went. The race was up. He used the same old tactics: above the butterfly he soared, then, gauging the distance from his own great beak to butterfly beneath he folded his wings and dropped like a plummet of lead.