“So I did, but a workman had come to do something to the chimney, and had left a ladder standing against the wall.”
“You don’t mean to say Squirrie had killed your young ones?”
“Every one; there they lay in the nest, their dear little throats bitten.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“My mate Jennie was nearly crazy, and so was I. I called up some of my sparrow friends, Jim and Dandy and Johnny White-Tail and Black Gorget, and Squirrie got the most awful pecking a squirrel ever had. We chased him all over the housetops and on to the trees. He leaped from one branch to another, and we took nips out of him till he was red, too, and very sore. You see, he had no Snug Hollow to run to.”
“If he had been a good squirrel,” I said, “those ladies would not have had his home boarded up.”
“Just so. Squirrie was beginning to find out that a bad squirrel always gets punished by some bird or beast. Well, at last the little wretch found his breath giving out, and he chattered, ‘Mer-mer-mercy!’ We all gathered round him, as he lay panting on a limb flat on his stomach to get cool. We bound him over to keep the peace, telling him that if he ever
killed another sparrow, he would be driven out of the neighborhood.”
“I wonder if you should not have driven him away then, in the interests of other little birds?”
“But there are so many bird murderers,” said the sparrow patiently. “Boys stone us and shoot us, cats hunt us. Black Thomas, the cat in the boarding-house, boasts that he catches fifty birds a year, foreigners kill us, especially Italians who will shoot even a chickadee to put in their soup. It seems to me that everybody is down on birds, and they are hardest of all on sparrows.”