Our garden was walled in. There was a large kennel on a grass-plot under my grandmother's bedroom window, and she stopped in front of it.
"This can be fitted up for the crow, Elizabeth."
"But what about Rover?" I said. "Where will he sleep?"
"Down in the cellar, by the furnace," she said. "He is getting to be rheumatic, and I owe him a better shelter than this in his old age. I shall have a window put in at the back, so that the sun can shine in."
For several days the crow sat in the kennel, his wings raised,—the stump of the broken one was left,—making him look like a person shrugging his shoulders, and the blood thickening and healing over his wounds. Three times a day my grandmother dragged him out and pushed some bread and milk down his throat; and three times a day he kicked and struggled and clawed at her hands. But it soon became plain that he was recovering.
One day my grandmother found him trying to feed himself, and she was as much pleased as a child would have been. The next day he stepped out on the grass-plot. There he found a fine porcelain bath, that my grandmother had bought for him. It was full of warm water, and he stepped into it, flapped his wing with pleasure, and threw the water over his body.
"He is coming on!" cried my grandmother; "he will be the joy of my life yet."
"What about Second Cousin George?" I asked.
Second Cousin George—we had to call him that to distinguish him from old George, the coachman—was a relative that lived with us. He was old, cranky, poor, and a little weak-minded, and if it had not been for my grandmother he would have been obliged to go to an almshouse. He hated everything in the world except himself,—pets especially,—and if he had not been closely watched, I think he would have put an end to some of the creatures that my grandmother loved.