The Banksiae asked her how she felt, but she would not deign even
to reply; and when a friendly blackbird, who had often picked
grubs off her leaves, came and sang to her, she kept silent: a
Rosa Indica was far above a blackbird.

"Next time you want a caterpillar taken away, he may eat you for
ME!" said the blackbird, and flew off in a huff.

She was very ungrateful to hate the black-bird so, for he had been
most useful to her in doing to death all the larvae of worms and
beetles and caterpillars and other destroyers which were laid
treacherously within her leaves. The good blackbird, with many
another feathered friend, was forever at work in some good deed of
the kind, and all the good, grateful flowers loved him and his
race. But to this terribly proud and discontented Rosa Damascena
he had been a bore, a common creature, a nuisance, a monster--any
one of these things by turns, and sometimes all of them
altogether. She used to long for the cat to get him.

"You ought to be such a happy rose!" the merle had said to her,
one day. "There is no rose so strong and healthy as you are,
except the briers."

And from that day she had hated him. The idea of naming those
hedgerow brier roses in the same breath with her!

You would have seen in that moment of her rage a very funny sight
had you been there; nothing less funny than a rose tree trying to
box a blackbird's ears!