Mrs. Martin opened the door of our house and came out. I gazed down at the beloved brown figure and uttered a glad, “Peep!”
She whistled back to me, “Dear O! Cheer O!” then looking up, she said “Eh! making friends. Tell your sparrow bird that I bought some rice for him to-day, and I think he will like it better than the bread crumbs I have been putting out on the food table lately.”
The grateful Chummy leaned forward, gave his tail a joyous flirt, and said “T-check! chook! chook!”
“I’ll throw some right here for him in the morning,” said Missie, and she pointed to the hard-packed snow under the library window. “There’s such a crowd round the food table.”
Chummy gave a loud, joyful call. He was sure of a good tea to-night and a fine breakfast in the morning, and what more could a sparrow ask than two meals in advance?
“If she had feathers, she would be a very beautiful bird,” he said, as we watched her going toward the boarding-house, “and that is more than you can say of some of the women that go up and down this street.”
“What a sad looking boarding-house that is,” I said as we watched her going toward it. “Those black streaks up and down its yellow walls look as if it had been crying.”
Chummy was staring through the big drawing-room window that had fine yellow silk curtains.
“Just look at those women in there,” he said, “they have a nice fire, a white table and a maid bringing in hot muffins and cake and lovely thin slices of bread and butter to say nothing of the big silver tea-pot and the cream jug, and a
whole bowl of sugar. I wish I had some of it, and they sit and stuff themselves, and never throw us any of it, and when summer comes they wouldn’t have a rose if we didn’t pick the plant lice off their bushes.”