“Are you glad to see the children, Sukey?” I would ask her, and her bow was always received with outbursts of laughter. Naturally I was careful only to ask questions that required an answer in the affirmative. If I became too much absorbed in my writing to play with her, she would get impatient, and descending to the desk, would catch at my pen or, naughtiest trick of all, drink from the ink bottle. Often I have looked up, discovered a dripping black beak, and have rushed from the room to wash her mouth.
Although she loved my study when I was alone, she hated it when it was full of company. Often visitors would beg to see the Princess, and I would send upstairs for her. She was not really afraid, but she hated a crowd, and after holding her by force a few minutes, I would put her on the floor, and with her ruff shaking with anger she would trot into the hall and go upstairs to her room.
One day she laid an egg on my writing-desk. I took it upstairs, made a nest of soft cloths for her, and put the egg in it. The third day she laid another egg. I advised her to take the bed for a nesting-place, and although she subsequently laid eggs in other places, this, for a long time, was her chosen home, and she would drive any other bird from its sacred precincts.
She seemed fascinated by these two eggs, and sat on them nearly all the time, caressing them, and turning them over and over with her beak. I was amused with her actions, for she had no shyness and no fear of human beings. Of course, every bird turns her eggs over to keep them in condition, but how seldom one sees a bird in the act of turning them. Sukey’s actions with her eggs then and since convince me that she really had some kind of attachment for them. I had had an idea before this that the sitting on eggs was duty work, the only real pleasure coming with the nestlings.
If any bird dared alight near these precious eggs she would peck furiously at it. She was also reluctant to leave the eggs unless I would watch them. If I would sit down beside them she would at once step carefully off them, lift up her feet like a skirt dancer, and stretch first one long wing and then another, as if tired of sitting, then go for a walk about the room.
The instant I rose she would rush back to her nest, and if she got hungry before I had leisure to return to her, she would hurry to her seed-box and eat so rapidly that it seemed as if she would choke. She had made up her pigeon mind that she would not let those beloved eggs get cold.
Often as I sat by her nest she would bring me little wisps of straw, and would tuck them around the eggs, or would hold them out to me in her beak, meaning that I was to have the privilege of arranging them. Her actions were very curious and interesting, and I could not help wondering whether human beings were often honored by birds to the extent of being requested to assist in the work of making a nest.
Better than straws were hairpins, hatpins, or safety-pins. She had been brought up in a bedroom, and my pincushion had always been an object of interest to her. I have seen her take a long hatpin in her beak, toss it up in the air, catch it, and go to her nest with it.
The invisible hairpins were her chief favorites, and one day my sister said to me, “I cannot imagine where all my invisible hairpins are.”
“Go to Sukey’s nest,” I said, and there she found neatly arranged around the eggs the missing hairpins. I have often taken sharp pins from her nest, in the fear that she might stick them into herself.