"I'm sorry I brought him, Miss, to trouble you," said the coachman. "But Tom won't let him go. He'd a lot of trouble catching him, and if he's no good to you, Tom'll be glad of him to stuff. He's got some glass eyes out of a stuffed fox the moths ate, and he's bent on stuffing an owl, is Tom. The eyes would be too big for a pheasant, but they'll look well enough in an owl, he thinks."
My hearing is very acute, and not a word of that Bad Boy's brutal intentions was lost on me. I shrunk among my feathers and shivered with despair; but when I heard the voice of Little Miss I rounded my ear once more.
"No, Williams, no! He must not be stuffed. Oh, please beg Tom to come to me. Perhaps I can give him something to persuade him not. If he must stuff an owl, please, please let him stuff a strange owl. One I haven't made friends with. Not this one. He is very wild, but he is very lovely and soft, and I do so want him to be let go."
"Well, Miss, I'll send Tom, and you can settle it with him. All I say, he's a Tartar, and stuffing's too good for him."
Whether she bribed Tom, or persuaded him, I don't know, but Little Miss got her way, and that Bad Boy let me go, and I went back to my Ivy Bush.
OWLHOOT I.
"What can't be cured must be endured."
Old Proverb.
It was the wish to see Little Miss once more that led my wings past her nursery window; besides, I had a curiosity to look at the clock.
It is an eight-day clock, in a handsome case, and would, undoubtedly, have been a becoming perch for a bird of my dignified appearance, but I will not describe it to-day. Nor will I speak of my meditations as I sit in my Ivy Bush like any other common owl, and reflect that if I had not had my own way, but had listened to Little Miss, I might have sat on an Eight-day Clock, and been godfather to the children. It is not seemly for an owl to doubt his own wisdom, but as I have taken upon me, for the sake of Little Miss, to be a child's counsellor, I will just observe, in passing, that though it is very satisfactory at the time to get your own way, you may live to wish that you had taken other folk's advice instead.