I kept her a year, then opening the door, told her to fly outside if she wished. She did wish, and calmly went to the flower garden, hopped about there for a while, followed the men plowing near-by, then accepting the advances made to her by a respectable-looking wild robin, built a nest on one of the house windows, raised a family of young robins, and I hope, went south with them when autumn came, for I have seen nothing of her since.
My next robin was my beloved Dixie, and I have had him only a few months. During June of the year 1907 I saw, on looking out of the windows of the little sun-room on the top of the house, that a pair of robins had built a nest at the back of the box on a tall telephone post near-by. They seemed to have young ones on one side of it, and a pair of sparrows seemed to have their young ones on the other side.
I kept watch, and soon I saw the old robins going in and out with worms hanging from their beaks. At night the mother robin would sit on the nest, and the father would perch in a tall tree across the street. He might have sat close to her, if our beautiful big elms in front of the house had not been killed by some mysterious disease.
One June day, as I sat writing in my study, I heard a pair of birds having hysterics in our garden, and springing up, I went to the window. They were robins of course—it seems to me that of all the birds I know, the robin is the most noisy and fussy when danger threatens him. Instead of keeping still, which might have enabled them to have their little nestling with them, they were yelling at the tops of their voices because he had flown into the garden and could not get out. Therefore, at their outcry, a ring of little faces surrounded the fluttering baby.
“Please go away, children,” I called out, and they obediently disappeared.
“Now,” I reflected, “if I can only keep the cats off!”
By some miracle, the cats did not enter our garden that morning, but I was sorry to see that the little robin could not rise higher than the fence. The parents were too frightened to feed him there, and at last I went out and tried to catch him.
In vain—I, of course, was as formidable to him as a cat, and when he saw me coming he managed to flutter over the fence into the street, and to the low branch of a tree. I promptly returned to the house, and in a few minutes he was in the garden again. I tried not to watch him. The cats would soon get him—and what was one robin more or less, anyway?
It was a good deal—it was the whole world to me that morning, and any bird-lover will understand my feelings. I would write a little, then would hurry to the window to see that no enemy came near that precious baby bird. I admired his calmness. He sat all the morning on a fence-post, and only toward noon did he slip under some raspberry bushes. I hoped that his parents might find him there, but I doubted it, and with a sinking heart I went away to fulfil an engagement.
I could not keep the stoical little birdie out of my thoughts, and the sequel to his story is as strange as a made-up one.