The Devil's Other Storybook by Natalie Babbitt

Author:Natalie Babbitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Published: 1987-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Lessons

There was a sharp-eyed parrot once who lived with a doting old woman and was her pride and joy. His name was Columbine, and instead of growing up with pirates, and learning all kinds of nasty language, he had spent his youth with a clergyman and acquired, in his earliest lessons, another kind of language altogether. Then, having outlived the clergyman—for parrots survive to amazing great ages—he moved to the old woman’s cottage, where he learned to say things like “Sweetheart, kiss me quick,” and was just as well content. Still, Columbine was no sissy. He was big and shrewd and liked things on the up-and-up. And to keep them that way, he sat all day on his perch in the old woman’s window, with his eye peeled, and he watched for trouble.

The old woman’s cottage was on the main road, and all day long the carts went by, and the wagons, and people on horseback or muleback or clumping along on foot, going from here to there and Heaven knows where else. And Columbine looked hard at everyone. When someone went by who looked suspicious, he’d say “Oh-oh,” or “Look out,” or sometimes even “Lock the doors!” But there wasn’t any need for locks with Columbine around. He was better than any lock or bolt, or even any watchdog, just by the way he sat in the window with his eye peeled.

Now, one day it happened that the Devil came down the road disguised as a strolling musician with a fiddle under his arm. Columbine saw through the costume in a minute—that’s how sharp his eye was—and he squawked, “It’s the Devil! The Devil! Fire! Flood! Pestilence! Run for your lives!” And while he was squawking, he flapped his wings something awful, and hopped up and down, and made such a racket that the old woman hid under the bed.

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