This was the beginning of her career.
THE BOBOLINK.
IT was the sunniest corner in Viger where old Garnaud had built his cabin,—his cabin, for it could not be called a house. It was only of one story, with a kitchen behind, and a workshop in front, where Etienne Garnaud mended the shoes of Viger. He had lived there by himself ever since he came from St. Valérie; every one knew his story, every one liked him. A merry heart had the old shoemaker; it made a merry heart to see him bending his white head with its beautiful features above his homely work, and to hear his voice in a high cadence of good-humored song. The broad window of his cabin was covered with a shutter hinged at the top, which was propped up by a stick slanted from the window-sill. In the summer the sash was removed, and through the opening came the even sound of the Blanche against the bridge piers, or the scythe-whetting from some hidden meadow. From it there was a view of a little pool of the stream where the perch jumped clear into the sun, and where a birch growing on the bank threw a silver shadow-bridge from side to side. Farther up, too, were the willows that wore the yellow tassels in the spring, and the hollow where burr-marigolds were brown-golden in August. On the hill slope stood a delicate maple that reddened the moment summer had gone, which old Etienne watched with a sigh and a shake of the head.
If the old man was a favorite with the elder people of Viger, he was a yet greater favorite with the children. No small portion of his earnings went toward the purchase of sugar candy for their consumption. On summer afternoons he would lay out a row of sweet lumps on his window-sill and pretend to be absorbed by his work, as the children, with much suppressed laughter, darted around the corner of his cabin, bearing away the spoils. He would pause every now and then to call, “Aha—Aha! Where are all my sweeties? those mice and rats must have been after them again!” and would chuckle to himself to hear the children trying to keep back the laughter, out of sight around the corner. In the winter, when the boys and girls would come in to see him work, he always managed to drop some candy into their pockets, which they would find afterward with less surprise than the old man imagined.
But his great friend was the little blind daughter of his neighbor Moreau. “Here comes my little fairy,” he would call out, as he saw her feeling her way down the road with her little cedar wand. “Here comes my little fairy,” and he would go out to guide her across the one plank thrown over the ditch in front of his cabin. Then they would sit and chat together, this beautiful old man and the beautiful little girl. She raised her soft brown, sightless eyes to the sound of his voice, and he told her long romances, described the things that lay around them, or strove to answer her questions. This was his hardest task, and he often failed in it; her questions ran beyond his power, and left him mystified.
One spring he bought a bobolink from some boys who had trapped it; and he hung its cage in the sun outside his cabin. There it would sing or be silent for days at a time. Little Blanche would sit outside under the shade of the shutter, leaning half into the room to hear the old man talk, but keeping half in the air to hear the bird sing.
They called him “Jack” by mutual consent, and he absorbed a great deal of their attention. Blanche had to be present at every cage cleaning. One day she said, “Uncle Garnaud, what is he like?”
“Why, dearie, he’s a beauty; he’s black all over, except his wings and tail, and they have white on them.”
“And what are his wings like?”