Judge — August 6, 1927 — page 20: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

JUDGE This Flying Fever The other morning I walked down to the far edge of the meadow and stretched myself on the grass with a good book. It was a peaceful, drowsy day and the bees hummed a soporific lullaby to me, Suddenly a babel of voices seemed to penetrate through the noise of the insects. I looked up expecting to behold a visitor, but no one near me. Then suddenly, in a flash of intuition, I realized that it had been given to me to understand the language of birds. I remained very quiet and gradually the chirping of a nearby group of sparrows became intelligible to me. They were all fluttering ex citedly about a little sparrow who hung his head very modestly. An old, venerable | sparrow slowly flew from the limb of an ancient oak and, to the accom paniment of a chorus of “bravos”” from the feathered folk, pro. ceeded in splendid sentences to tell the younger bird how much the latter's achievement was ap- preciated and in what esteem he was held by his brothers. He pinned a tiny medal on the proud breast of the little bird and then the entire group flew away in for- mation. A few minutes later a coura- geous (or maybe curious) sparrow hopped over to where I was sitting. “Hello,” he chirped. “Hello, yourself,” I answered. Say, by the way, what was the ion I just witnessed here —the pinning on of a medal and all the speeches?” The statistical department of a modern cigarette factory deter- mines the number of coughs in a carload. “I thought you knew,” he answered. ““We were just honor ing ‘Tiny’ Strongwing, the first baby sparrow to make a non-stop flight from the roof of Jenkin’s barn to the brook. Old Fuzzy- feather, in the interests of bird aviation, offered a prize of twenty-five worms for the flight, and though ten birds entered only ‘Tiny’ finished. Great litth aviator, ‘Tiny.’ He's going to go after the thirty worm prize to morrow and will attempt to fly from the Methodist Church D Rey steeple to the old apple tree over There is certainly room for improvement in after-dinner there on the hill, for ALLL comicbooks.com