Dark days followed. At first only a prisoner, his cruel master now made him into a galley-slave. He put a chain round his foot, and condemned him to the servitude of the car and cord. So drag your weight, work your pulley, haul in your little car, poor outcast! Who has not seen the monstrous spectacle—one of God’s creatures, created to fly free in the realms of air, coming and going on a toy platform, a ring about its leg? Who has not seen the unhappy captive, to win meat and drink, drawing up by little laborious jerks the water-jar and car, its eye gleaming with pitiful longing, gaining its subsistence by a never-ending useless martyrdom? Only he who has seen the cruel sight knows to what lengths the cruelty of bad men can go.
This was the fate of the poor goldfinch.
The man had given him a cage to imitate a Swiss châlet, in front of which was a little terrace. On the terrace was fixed a post, with a pulley attached worked by a thread. This thread the captive had to pull in with his beak, little by little, till the little drinking-bucket hooked to the other end rose to the level of the platform; then putting his foot on the cord, he had to hold it in place and so drink a drop, bitter as a tear, hurriedly and fearfully, lest the thread should slip from under his claw and suddenly let the bucket run down again.
More often than not the bucket upset in its descent, and then he had to go without water for the rest of the day.
A second thread made it possible for him to haul to the edge of the platform a miniature car running on an inclined plane outside the cage; this held his bird-seed. What a struggle it was to drag it up! At each snap of the beak the car would ascend, but oh! so slowly. By successive jerks, never tiring, never stopping, with straining neck, working with the adroitness of a galley-slave, and clapping his foot on the cord after each pull, he had to drag up the accursed car, which would sometimes elude him and dash down the incline again, spilling the seed and mocking all his laborious efforts!
A hundred times a day he was forced to begin the horrid task again.
Many a time the goldfinch resolved to give in and die of hunger; but hunger is a terrible thing, and no sooner did its pangs begin to pinch his little stomach than he would seize the cord afresh and pull for dear life.
X
So passed the hours for the once happy bridegroom. Never a chirp now, never a flirt of the tail! Disconsolate and draggled, every feather of his little body betraying the misery of his broken life, he seemed an embodiment of the bitter protest of the winged creation against the cruelty of man.
A feeble ray of sunshine used to flicker on the garret walls towards midday; he would watch for it, and when it came at last, shooting a slender pencil of gold, in which the dust-motes danced athwart the gloom of his prison-house, it was like a brief instant of recovered freedom; for a moment he forgot his chain, his car, his slavery, and away he flew in fancy to the great orchards that showed their black masses of shadow on the horizon. Alas! the sunbeam slid along the wall and disappeared, and the appalling reality came home to him again.