It was a terrible chase the two poets gave him--the tumbling, darting, circling of the birds in fiendish delight, in maddened earnestness. Their very wings were often so close that they fanned him about until he looked like a speck of gold tissue paper hurled about by contrary winds. Twice they got above him, dropped on him and--missed. Twice I lost him altogether, and, except that I saw the birds fluttering and darting in the air, I had thought he was lost. When I saw him again he had gotten above his enemies and was safely pursuing his zig-zag, frightened, graceless, paper-fluttering flight for the trees and life. “Success to you, O, Golden Wings,” I said, “for already have you taught me a lesson in life. Let us keep above our enemies, if we would be safe--not beneath them, for there we are a prey to their dirty talons; not on their level, for then 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 stars above us.” The birds dropped down, baffled, to rest in the top of a sugar maple. They had evidently lost their tempers, and, between panting and hard breathing, I could hear them quarreling: “It was you,” said the wife--“you conceited thing--all your fault. I had him once if you had let me alone.” “O, you had him, you did--‘over the left.’ If your talents equaled your tongue we’d be better off.” They screeched and shuffled about and almost spat at each other. They were beaten, chagrined and mad, and they took it out on each other. And if you want to see the refinement of ill-temper, stir up two poets! Golden Wings was safe. He was high in the air, his very flight was now the flight of victory, his poise the poise of one who had won. Twenty yards more he would drop down into the green trees where his mate, perhaps, awaited him, and be safe. I was about to hurrah with delight, when I saw a lightning bolt of red and white drop from the jagged bark of the dead limb of a towering oak in the midst of the forest and high above poor, weary, fluttering yet happy Golden Wings. I paled at the thought, for I knew no butterfly ever escaped him. Even Golden Wings recognized his doom and, paralyzed with fear, stopped his flight in mid-air and, in a few yards of his goal, and lay floating in the air in hopeless fear. And well he might, for the red and white bolt was the red-headed woodpecker, not generally known to be a fly-catcher, but an expert in it, nevertheless. Often had I seen him poise above a luckless moth, drop like a plummet, and no moth would be there. I despised him as a marauder, besides, for only yesterday I’d seen him pounce on a helpless young humming-bird and rend it as if it had been a worm. Straight at poor Golden Wings he came. The race was up.