I guessed that the cutthroat had been exploring, and in searching for a new place for a nest had been led by his curiosity to enter the squirrels’ open doorway. Resenting the intrusion, they had probably jumped at him and killed him. I knew that red squirrels would kill birds, and being now suspicious of these gray gymnasts, I had a carpenter come and fasten their box outside instead of inside the netting. Naturally, they did not stay in it, and I hope ran either to the gardens or the park, where they would find numbers of red squirrels to play with them.

CHAPTER XXVIII
JAPANESE ROBINS AND A BOBOLINK

I have not up to this time said much about the birds in my collection that were usually most remarked by strangers. They were the Japanese robins, or Peking nightingales.

I had heard of these red-billed, orange-breasted little birds with their large black eyes, and shortly after I began keeping birds had one sent to me. He was indeed a beauty, and in excellent condition, and had traveled as comfortably as a bird can travel in a good-sized cage with plenty of food and a sponge in his drinking-cup, so that if the water were spilt, he could suck the moisture from it.

I took him into my study, and in trying to slip him from his traveling-cage into a larger one, for I always like to keep new arrivals in quarantine for a few days, he escaped from me.

Now I was to see some of the lightning-like movements that the bird books spoke of. I closed the doors and he went around the room like a streak of light. I thoroughly believed what I had heard—that no cat can catch this robin, unless he chooses to be caught, and that he can clear a room of flies in a few minutes. Now he was this side of me, now the other. I had to keep turning my head to follow the swift motions of this little acrobat. As I watched him I admired more and more the red and orange of his costume, and the ring of white around his wonderful eyes that gave him a distinguished and foreign appearance. I had read of his rich, throaty song, his mellow calls, and listened anxiously for the first sounds to issue from his pretty throat.

To my dismay he suddenly began to scold me, uttering hoarse, chattering, grating noises. I saw that he was excited and angry. This was not singing. It was scolding. I put him in the aviary the next day, and stopped staring at him. He hid for some time in a fir tree, then he came out, began to be at home, never acted shy or strange again, and sang nearly all day long a song that was all my fancy had imagined it.

I was intensely interested in this foreigner that never for an instant lost his foreign look, his foreign ways, and yet who seemed more at home than any native bird in my aviary. He kept up his inconceivably yet gracefully rapid movements. He would start at one end of the aviary, snatch a morsel from a food-dish, peck at a bit of fruit, turn a kind of somersault in the air, and land in a water-pan, where he would take a partial bath, and then dart off again. I never saw him take a complete bath, though he would be in the tub forty times a day. He was always in too much of a hurry to finish.

He seemed to have quite a talent for mischief, and one day I could not help smiling as I saw him play a roguish trick on my robin Bob. He watched her leave her nest and get out of sight, then he darted to the eggs, settled down on them with a blissful expression of countenance and shut his eyes, as if to say, “How lovely to have something to care for!” Another flash of thought then struck him. He sprang up, gave one of the eggs a good sharp peck that made a hole in it, and scampered off to avoid reprisals from the wrathful Bob who screamed if any one meddled with her eggs.