but the green and yellow parrots too plainly showed a strong disposition to put another interpretation on the phraseology.  My paternal nest was situated in the hollow of one of the most ancient and lofty trees in the forest.  It had once been rich in fruit and flowers, gums and odours, and all in the same season; and though it was now scathed at the top, hollow in the trunk, and was threatened with total ruin from the first hurricane, we still preferred it, because it was the oldest.  I owed all my early impressions, and much of my acquired superiority, to my great grandfather, who lived to an extreme old age, and attained a celebrity, of which we were ourselves at that time unaware.  He was the identical bird which was brought from Marignan to Prince Maurice, governor of the Brazils, and whose pertinent answers to many silly questions are recorded in the pages of the greatest of English philosophers.  My great grandfather was soon disgusted with the folly and cruelty of what is called civilized life; and having seen an Indian roasted alive for a false religion’s sake, he thought that some day they might take it into their heads to do as much by a macaw, for the same reason.  So he availed himself of an early opportunity of retiring without leave from the service, and returned to his native forest, where his genius and learning at once raised him to the highest honours of the Psittacan aristocracy.  Influenced by his example, I early felt the desire of visiting foreign countries.  My mother too (who, though fond and indulgent, like all the mothers of our race, was as vain and foolish as any that I have since met with in human society) worked powerfully on my ambition, by her constant endeavours to “push me up the tree,” as she called it, in her way.  I was already a first-rate orator, and a member of the great congress of macaws; while in our social re-unions I left all the young birds of fashion far behind me:  and as I not only articulated some human sounds picked up from the Indians, but could speak a few words of Portuguese and Dutch, learned by rote from my great grandfather, I was considered a genius of high order.  With the conceit, therefore, of all my noble family, I was prompted to go forth and visit other and better worlds, and to seek a sphere better adapted to the display of my presumed abilities, than that afforded by our domestic senate and home-spun society.  On one of those celestial nights, known only in the tropical regions, I set forth on my travels, directing my course to the Portuguese settlement, which the youthful vigour of my wing enabled me to reach by the break of morning.  Having refreshed myself with a breakfast of fruit, after the exhaustion of my nocturnal flight, I ascended a spacious palm tree, which afforded an admirable view of the adjacent country, and a desirable shelter from the ardours of the rising sun.  My first impulse was to take a bird’s-eye view of the novel scene which lay before me, and I gazed around for some minutes with intense delight;