"Maybe a star will suppose it's another star and come down and stay with it," suggested Wallace, trying to buttress my sagging courage.
"His winglets are so wild and so weak."
"I believe the other birds know where he is. Please tell us," entreated Wallace, addressing a solemn crow that had just flapped over from the wood to a neighboring fence-post.
"Now it's no use to be asking of His Riverence," put in Mary. "All the crows were prastes once and they talk only the Latin."
It was one of Joy-of-Life's miracles. It was almost dark when, tired and hungry, she came home from Boston,—from a committee meeting of philanthropists who had been quarreling as only philanthropists can. She looked into Taka's empty cage, stayed but for a glass of milk and a few inquiries as to our field of search, and then, taking an electric torch, slipped softly into Giant Bluff's cherished tangle of luxuriant rosebushes, where the rest of us had not dared to venture. In a few minutes she emerged, scores of irate briars catching at her clothes and hair. She was crooning as she came out and in her safe clasp nestled a sleepy little bird.
Soon after this episode, Joy-of-Life went west for her summer sojourn among the birds at a Wisconsin lake, leaving to Mary, Robin Hood and myself the guardianship of that forlorn mite. He was as obstinate as ever in his lonesomeness, always pettishly rebuffing the friendly advances of Robin and, though I would take his cage to the vicinity of bird after bird, hoping that in some one of these he might recognize a kindred spirit, he found nothing of his feather. The white-breasted nuthatch, after nearly two months of absence, presumably for the rearing of a brood in leafy seclusion, returned for a call at the feeding-box, looking as genteel as ever in his tailor-made gray suit, but so preoccupied with domestic memories that at first he would say nothing but "Spank! spank! spank!" I brought Taka to the window and he looked on disdainfully while I tried to win Nuthatch back to his winter phrase of "Thank! thank! thank!" Only once did he revert to bachelor freedom of expression. That was when he fluttered up to the nutmeat bag and found it dangling empty:
"What a prank, prank, prank, to rob my bank, bank, bank! oh, the offense is rank, rank, rank!"
At this explosion of resentment Taka gave an involuntary chirp, and Nuthatch, the most inquisitive and alert of all our bird visitors, looked the stranger over keenly before he retorted with shocking rudeness, "You're a crank, crank, crank," and flew off to see what the brown creeper, zigzagging wrong side up about the rough-barked trunk of an old oak, was finding good to eat.
Once I carried Taka well out into the wildwood, but he was not interested in any of its busy tenants,—not in little Chippy, who all but pushed his russet crown between the bars of the cage, nor in Yellow-Hammer, stabbing the ground for ants, nor in
"yonder thrush,