Most of them seemed to know him and love his presence.

Presently, he came to one very old parrot, quite different from any Felix had ever seen on any trees in the island; it was a parrot with a black crest and a red mark on its throat, half blind with age, and tottering on its pedestal.

This solemn old bird sat apart from all the others, nodding its head oracularly in the sunlight, and blinking now and again with its white eyelids in a curious senile fashion.
The Frenchman turned to Felix with an air of profound mystery.

"This bird," he said, solemnly stroking its head with his hand, while the parrot turned round to him and bit at his finger with half-doddering affection--"this bird is the oldest of all my birds---is it not so, Methuselah ?--and illustrates well in one of its aspects the superstition of these people.

Yes, my friend, you are the last of a kind now otherwise extinct, are you not, _mon vieux ?_ No, no, there--gently! Once upon a time, the natives tell me, dozens of these parrots existed in the island; they flocked among the trees, and were held very sacred; but they were hard to catch and difficult to keep, and the Kings of the Birds, my predecessors, failed to secure an heir and coadjutor to this one.