“I don’t want to go out in the room, mother,” I chirped bitterly. “I want to stay with you. Green-Top is so ugly to me and sets my cousins on to tease me. They crowd me at
night on the perch, they make me wait at the food dishes till they have eaten. I want to live with you. You are so pretty and so good and comfortable.”
“Darling, darling,” she twittered in her lovely soft tones. “Come at night and perch near me. Wait till your father puts his head under his wing.”
This was very soothing, and at least I had happy nights, although my days were always more or less worried. Parents don’t know what a lot of trouble their young ones have when they first leave the home nest.
To come back to our singing lesson. My father was terribly strict with us, and we just hated it, though our mother told us to get all we could out of him, for as soon as the new nestlings came he would not pay much attention to us.
“Then what will you do,” she said, “for a canary that can not sing is a no-account canary?”
“I wish I were a hen-bird like Cayenna,” I said sulkily. “She never has to sing.”
“Hen birds never sing,” said my mother. “Cayenna’s beauty and the exquisite coloring
that she will have later on, for I shall make her eat plenty of pepper food, will carry her through life. You are a very plain little bird, my darling. Your voice will be your only charm. Promise me, promise me, that you will mind what your daddy says.”
“I’ll try, mother,” I used to say every time she talked to me, but at nearly every lesson, when my father lost his temper, I forgot what I had promised her, and lost mine too. This day I was particularly sulky, and it wasn’t long before I was getting a good pecking from my father Norfolk.