“And you be careful,” said Billie irritably. “She would kill you in an instant if she got her paws on you. You don’t know monkeys. They’re not civilized like dogs.”
Fresh from my adventure with the squirrel, I felt a bit cautious. “What shall I do, Billie?” I sang. “What shall I do, do, do?”
“Fly upstairs to the bird-room,” said Billie, who, in the midst of all her nervousness, was taking thought for me, “and stay there till Nella goes. She is very mischievous. You’ll see that Missie can’t keep her.”
“Could I stay here if I kept in my cage?” I asked.
“No, no!” barked Billie impatiently. “You just ought to see her climb. She would swarm up those picture frames and leap to your cage,
and have her fingers on your throat in no time. Fly upstairs, I tell you. Fly quickly, before Mrs. Martin goes out of the room.”
“I fly, I fly,” I sang, and when Mrs. Martin opened the door to go and get some fruit for Mrs. Monkey I dashed upstairs and sat on the electrolier in the upper hall till our Mary came along and opened the bird-room door for me.
Such a chattering and gabbling arose among the canaries on my entrance! “Why, look at Dicky-Dick! Where’s your tail, Dicky? Surely he has had a bad fight with some bird, or was it an accident? Tell us, Dicky; tell us, tell, tell.”
Even the parakeets and the gentle indigo birds and nonpareils called out to me, “Speak, speak quick! Who hurt you?”
Not since I left the bird-room and took up my quarters downstairs had I been so glad to get back to it. Many of these birds were my relatives. They might tease me, and there might be jealousies between us, but they were my own kind, and they would never, never treat me as a squirrel would, or a monkey. So I told them the whole story.