“Never mind, old girl,” says Tommy Swallow, after the first big cry is over, to Jenny Swallow, “let’s try again.”
And half an hour later, full of fresh plans, they are choosing another likely site, chattering cheerfully once more. I watched the building of a particular nest for nearly a fortnight one year; and when, after two or three days’ absence, I returned and found a pair of sparrows comfortably encsonced therein, I just felt mad. I saw Mrs. Sparrow looking out. Maybe my anger was working upon my imagination, but it seemed to me that she nodded to me:
“Nice little house, ain’t it? What I call well built.”
Mr. Sparrow then flew up with a gaudy feather, dyed blue, which belonged to me. I recognised it. It had come out of the brush with which the girl breaks the china ornaments in our drawing-room. At any other time I should have been glad to see him flying off with the whole thing, handle included. But now I felt the theft of that one feather as an added injury. Mrs. Sparrow chirped with delight at sight of the gaudy monstrosity. Having got the house cheap, they were going to spend their small amount of energy upon internal decoration. That was their idea clearly, a “Liberty interior.” She looked more like a Cockney sparrow than a country one—had been born and bred in Regent Street, no doubt.
“There is not much justice in this world,” said I to myself; “but there’s going to be some introduced into this business—that is, if I can find a ladder.”
I did find a ladder, and fortunately it was long enough. Mr. and Mrs. Sparrow were out when I arrived, possibly on the hunt for cheap photo frames and Japanese fans. I did not want to make a mess. I removed the house neatly into a dust-pan, and wiped the street clear of every trace of it. I had just put back the ladder when Mrs. Sparrow returned with a piece of pink cotton-wool in her mouth. That was her idea of a colour scheme: apple-blossom pink and Reckitt’s blue side by side. She dropped her wool and sat on the waterspout, and tried to understand things.
“Number one, number two, number four; where the blazes”—sparrows are essentially common, and the women are as bad as the men—“is number three?”
Mr. Sparrow came up from behind, over the roof. He was carrying a piece of yellow-fluff, part of a lamp-shade, as far as I could judge.
“Move yourself,” he said, “what’s the sense of sitting there in the rain?”
“I went out just for a moment,” replied Mrs. Sparrow; “I could not have been gone, no, not a couple of minutes. When I came back—”