Mr. Flicker opened his sharp eyes and admired his sharp tail shafts. Then he peeped from behind his tree and called out, "Mr. Mocker kept me awake an hour in the night serenading young Mr. and Mrs. Sparrow. That is why I slept so late." [Illustration: Brown Towhee.] Mr. Mocker, in the top of his house, rang the breakfast bell. It sounded like the linnet and the towhee and the flicker and the robin all together. The mocker laughed, too, like a dozen birds, keeping his clapper going until the other people in the yard could scarcely hear their own voices. Up jumped little Mrs. Humming-bird and snatched a dewdrop from the cup of a morning-glory on the trellis. "I prefer to drink distilled water," she said, wiping her mouth. "I like to drink from the hydrant," said Madam Linnet. "Any water is good enough for me." Then she tilted herself on the top of the hydrant and swallowed three drops as they fell from the pipe. "What makes you always turn a somersault on the top of the hydrant?" asked Mrs. Towhee. "It doesn't look polite to stoop over like that, and drink with your head down." "I don't drink with my mouth on the edge of the cup, like some people I know," she said in reply to Mrs. Towhee. "Besides, it doesn't wet my face' when the drops fall right into my mouth like this. I like to turn upside down, too; it is good exercise for the muscles. What's the use of a bird always being so proper?" "Tut, tut!" said Mrs. Sparrow, "see how I drink." And she stood on the edge of the puddle under the hydrant, and laid her breast in the water, and drank, and drank, wetting her face and throat all over. "I'm not afraid of a wetting," she said. "What's all this talk about drinking?" asked old Mr. Butcher-bird, coming down on the party with a swoop of his wings that scared all the other birds back to the trees. "Don't run away," he said kindly. "I've had my breakfast." Then he began to pull tatters of lizard meat out of his bill. "Where do you suppose I got that lizard?" he asked of a goldfinch. "I have no idea," she answered. "I never saw a lizard up in the morning so early as this. Lizards are 'sun birds' and don't like cold, wet grass." "Ha, ha!" laughed the butcher. "I caught him yesterday asleep, and killed him, and pinned him on a thorn. I always get my breakfast ready over night." "I wish I had some wine to drink," observed Mr. Oriole, sadly. "The doctor says I ought to drink wine, I feel so weak." "What do you know about wine?" asked old Mr. Warbler, hopping along where the birds were talking. "I tasted some wine once from a broken bottle at the back door of a dram-shop, and it made me so dizzy I couldn't fly. I had to stay on the shed roof all the morning, feeling so foolish, and expecting to be caught by a cat any minute. I wouldn't drink wine." "I would, whole bottles of it," declared Mr. Oriole, laughing till he almost cried. Then all the frightened birds came back to the hydrant.