Monsieur le curé took snuff, he removed and replaced his spectacles. Monsieur le curé forgot himself. He went over all the early pages of his treatise, he struck out and interlined; he struggled with rebellious words. From time to time, he adjusted his spectacles more firmly, and opened and consulted an ancient book of great size. He was very busy, very deeply absorbed in his favorite employment. He forgot that somebody was waiting for him, and poor Livette, all alone in the parlor, with the dead birds and the shells, was sadly disturbed in mind. The melancholy that possessed her was not dissipated--far from it!--by the place in which she found herself. All the dead birds, most of which she recognized as birds of passage, reminded her of the weariness of winter, the season when the wave-washed island is immersed in fog. There were screech-owls, the pale-yellow owls that live in church-steeples and at night drink the oil in the church-lamps; vultures that come down from the Alps and Pyrenees in times of excessive cold; the ash-colored vulture that lives at Sainte-Baume. There are little tomtits, called _serruriers_ (locksmiths), which are found only on the banks of the Rhône, and _pendulines_, so called because they hang their nests like little pendulums from the flexible branches swaying to and fro above the water; and _stocking-makers_, whose nests resemble the tissue of a knitted stocking; and the _alcyon_, that is to say, the _bleuret_ or kingfisher; and the _siren_, of the brilliant diversified plumage, called also _honey-eater_, which flies north in the month of May, and spends its winters by preference in Camargue. There was a stork, that probably considered Camargue, between the dikes of the Rhône, a little like Holland. There, too, was the heron with its frill of delicate feathers, falling like a long fringe over its throat. Livette knew it only by the name of _galejon_, bestowed upon it in that neighborhood because the herons' favorite place of assemblage was the pond of Galejon. There was one that bore on its pedestal the date: 1807, and the words: _Purchased at Arles market_; it was of a bluish slate color, and had on its head three slender black feathers, a foot in length. Then there were flamingoes galore, for they sometimes build their nests by myriads in the marshes of Crau, sitting astride their nests which are as tall as their legs. And the divers! and grebes! and penguins, which are seldom seen! And the rascally pelican, called by the people thereabouts _grand gousier_!