It was the Eagle who said that. The process of education broke off short. Throughout the whole establishment there reigned such dead silence that one could even hear the whispers of slander creeping along the earth. The first victim of the new tendency of affairs was the woodpecker. Indeed, indeed the poor bird was not guilty; but he knew how to read and write, and that was quite sufficient ground for an accusation. “Do you know the rules of punctuation?” “Not only the rules of ordinary punctuation, but even those for extra signs, such as quotation marks, hyphens, parentheses; on my conscience, I always put them right.” “And can you distinguish the feminine from the masculine gender?” “I can. I should not make a mistake, even by night.” And that was all. The woodpecker was chained and placed in solitary confinement for life in a hollow tree. On the next day, being devoured by ants, he gave up the ghost in his prison. His sorrows were hardly over when the thunderbolt fell on the Academy of Science. The owls and night-jars, however, defended themselves sturdily; they did not wish to be evicted from their cosy free quarters. They said that they followed scientific pursuits, not in order to popularise science, but to protect it from the evil eye. But the kite instantly demolished their arguments by asking— “What’s the use of having science at all?” This being an unexpected question, they could give no answer. They were then separated and sold to market-gardeners, who killed and stuffed them and set them up in their nurseries for scarecrows. The farthing alphabets were next taken away from the baby rooks, and mashed up in a mortar, to form a homogeneous mass of pulp, which was then made into playing-cards. Matters grew worse and worse. After the owls and the night-jars came the turn of the starlings; then the corn-crakes, parrots, and finches. Even the deaf heath-cock was suspected of “a certain way of thinking,” on the ground that he held his tongue all day and slept all night. The staff of the establishment gradually dwindled away. At last there was no one left to serve the Eagle and his mate but the vulture and the kite. In the background there remained, of course, a crowd of rooks, who multiplied at a pace that was perfectly disgraceful; and the faster they multiplied the more their arrears of taxes accumulated. Finally the kite and vulture, having no one else to intrigue against (of course you don’t count the vulgar rooks), began to intrigue one against the other; and all on the ground of science. The vulture denounced the kite as reading the prayer-book in secret; and the kite invented against the vulture the slander that he kept the “New Song-Book” hidden in a hollow tree. The Eagle began to grow uneasy. But just at this moment an extraordinary thing happened. Finding themselves left without supervision, the rooks suddenly raised the question— “By the by, what did the farthing alphabet say about all this?”