I flew to her at once, and, putting up my tiny bill, touched her red, full lips. Such a big lady she was, and yet she reminded me of my little golden mother.
“Now we will go in to the table,” she said, “and little guest will sit on my right hand. Anna, bring the fern dish.”
Anna was a fair-haired girl who waited on the Martins and sometimes helped our Mary in the bird-room, so I knew her quite well. I had heard of the fern dish from bird guests of the Martins, and I watched her with great interest as she set it on the huge white table, that looked so queer to me that first day.
In the middle of the low, round dish of ferns was a little platform and on the platform was a perch. The bird guest sat on the perch and ate the food placed before him. He was not expected to run over the Martins’ table and help himself.
“Dearie, you will not care for soup,” said Mrs. Martin, when Anna placed a big thing like one of our bathing dishes before her.
I had never seen human beings eating, and as I sat on my perch in the fern dish I could not help smiling. They did not put their mouths down to their food, they brought the food up to their mouths by means of their arms, which are like our wings. Their legs they kept under the table.
The room in which they had their huge dishes of food and their enormous table was a wide and pleasant place with a little glass house off it, in which green and pleasant plants and flowers grew. I loved the air of this place, so peaceful and quiet, with the nice smell of food and no bad brother to bother me.
“Feed me, feed me,” I chirped, for I was getting hungry now.
“Wait, my angel pet,” said Mrs. Martin; “wait for the next course.”
Later on I described what came next to my mother, and she said it was the leg of a soft, woolly young creature that played on the meadows, and she wondered that good people like the Martins would eat it.