Louisa’s admiration for the Cardinal was marked; but for some days he took little notice of her, and his friends began to fear that their second attempt at match-making would prove a failure. April 30, however, some responsive interest was shown, and the next day Louis brought to the cage a brown bug, half an inch long, and gave Louisa his first meat-offering.
The second wooing progressed rapidly, and May 7, when Louisa was set free, the pair flew away together with unrestrained delight. After three days of liberty, Louisa flew back to the house with her mate, and thenceforth was a frequent visitor.
May 21, Louisa was seen carrying straws, and on June 6 her nest was discovered low down in a dense evergreen thorn. Four speckled eggs lay in the nest. These were hatched June 9, the parent birds, meantime and afterward, going regularly to market, and keeping up social relations with their friends.
In nine days after their exit from the shell, the little Cardinals left the nest and faced life’s sterner realities. A black cat was their worst foe, and more than once, during their youth, Louis flew to his devoted commissary and made known his anxiety. Each time, on following him to the nest, she found the black prowler, or one of his kind, watching for prey. On June 28, the black cat outwitted the allied forces, Señor Cardinal and his friends, and a little one was slain. The other three grew up, and enjoyed all the privileges of their parents, flying in at the window, and frequenting the bountiful porch.
July 25, Louisa disappeared from the scene, presumably on a southern trip, leaving the Cardinal sole protector, provider, and peacemaker for their lively and quarrelsome triplet. A fight is apparently as needful for the development of a young Cardinal as of an English schoolboy, possibly due in both cases to a meat diet.
Overfeeding was but temporary with our birds. On the 8th of August the migratory instinct prevailed over ease, indulgence, friendship, and the Cardinal with his brood left the house, where he had been so well entertained, to return no more. No more? Who shall say of any novel that it can have no sequel? Massachusetts may yet become the permanent home of the Kentucky Cardinal, the descendant to the third and fourth generation of Louis and his mate.
—Ella Gilbert Ives, in Bird-Lore.
As Gray Lady read the story of the Cardinal, the children, between listening to it and being intent on their work, forgot the Mockingbird in the window, upon whom the rays of the sun, that had gradually managed to pierce the clouds, were resting.
As her mother finished and paused, Goldilocks, with a very slight gesture, directed their glance toward the window, where the Mockingbird, having completed his toilet and meal, perched, wings slightly raised and quivering, with half-closed eyes, murmuring a few broken snatches of song, half to himself and half as if in a dream, his head thrown back and, oh, such a human expression of longing in his attitude, that Gray Lady, without speaking, turned the leaves of her scrap-book slowly until she came to a place where the long line of prose shortened to verse, and then in a low but distinct voice she read:—