“Our friend the sparrow here had told me about the sick woman. He was pretty sure it was the blind kid’s mother, but he didn’t dare to go too near. (You know some people don’t like to have sparrows around.) So I agreed to light on the window-sill and try to find out more. The sick woman has begun to sit up now, and every day at about noon she sits in an armchair close to the window. She looks awfully sick yet. Well, the nurse who takes care of her sprinkled some crumbs on the window-sill, and when I ate them she was ever so pleased. ‘I believe he would let us touch him, he looks so tame,’ she said one day; and the nurse said, ‘I don’t believe it, he’d fly off if you put your hand out towards him.’ I didn’t, though, and she was more pleased still when I hopped in and let her stroke my feathers. ‘Poor little thing, he’s lame!’ she said when she saw my crippled foot. ‘Oh, how my poor little boy would love you! He couldn’t see you, though, for he’s blind!’ and then she fell to crying and wondering what had become of her poor blind boy. The nurse tried to comfort her, and I did my best to make her understand that the blind kid was all right; but she didn’t take in what I said. I go to see her every day, and rack my brains to think of some way of bringing them together. I’ve tried to make Reordan follow me, but he hadn’t sense enough to know what I wanted. So what can we do about it?”
“Nothing that I know of,” replied Jack. “So long as humans can’t understand our language so well as we understand theirs, they will be greatly hampered. It is a great misfortune.”
The bull-dog Boxer had listened with much interest to the stories of the sparrow and the pigeon, occasionally licking his chops or shivering slightly,—signs that he was deeply moved. As the Fire-Dog finished his remark, he growled out,—
“Force them to it! That’s the only way!”
“But how?” asked the Fire-Dog. “That’s easier said than done. How would you propose going to work?”
“Seize them by the trouser’s leg and make them follow you.”
“And be taken for a mad dog,” remarked Jack.
“I shouldn’t care what they took me for,” replied Boxer, “so long as I carried my point. If I once got a good grip, they’d follow.”
“Unless the trousers gave way,” remarked the Fire-Dog. “I’d bet on your grip, Boxer. But, after all, that wouldn’t work, you know. We’ve got to wait until the humans find out about it in their own slow way.”