Adults who are hard-hearted never bring me a bird. Little, tender-souled children constantly bring bird patients to my hospital. “These children must rob nests,” a skeptical neighbor once remarked, as she observed children coming toward my house with birds.
“They do not,” I said decidedly. “I assure you that children often bring me birds at great inconvenience to themselves. They are on their way to the park or the harbor. They discover a robin or a sparrow, a finch or a yellowbird fallen from a tree. They turn back and bring it to me. One little lad going to school the other day, found a sparrow and came to me with it. He was in a great hurry, but he thought it his duty to look after the bird.
“If children are trained to be kind to birds when they are young, they will make laws for their protection when they are grown up, and will save the committal of a vast amount of cruelty and also enormous financial loss to the country by the destruction of insect-eating birds.”
I hope I convinced my neighbor. If she was open to argument, I did. If she was closed to it, I did not. Some dear, good people adopt the Scotchman’s knock-down policy: “When you see a boy, give him a crack. If he hasn’t just been committing some mischief, he is about to do it.”
All my boy neighbors were kind to my birds, and last year they did a very thoughtful thing for them.
They knew that I was in the habit of renewing the trees in my aviary every few months by burning old ones and getting some of the colored people about Halifax to bring in fresh ones from the country.
Last New Year’s the boys asked me if I did not want their Christmas trees. I said I would be delighted to have them, and one Saturday morning the boys and girls had a regular jubilee running round the snow-covered streets dragging the discarded trees after them, and shouting to other boys to call at the neighbors’ and see if they had not some to give away.
Some trees were put in the basement, others were dragged gaily through the halls and up the staircase through Sukey’s room to the roof-veranda. The birds sat in corners whispering and talking softly, for they knew the boys quite well and understood that the changing of the trees meant great amusement and occupation for them.
After the children left I walked about the aviary and glanced gratefully at the sweet-smelling evergreens. The birds were busy with exploring expeditions, for each tree had sticking to it bits of tinsel, twine, or wax. What a story each one might tell if it could speak, of happy children dancing round its gift-laden branches.
When I brought home my showy cardinal birds all my boy neighbors liked them. They were both fine singers, though the bird-books give the most of the praise to the Virginian. He had a powerful, and not always sweet song, and sometimes it came in long bursts, when it seemed as if the violence of his execution would rend his lovely red body apart.