He was so reasonable, so sure of me, so grateful for what I was doing, that I could scarcely refrain from seizing his pretty red body in my hands and caressing him as I do my pet pigeons whom I often wake from their sleep.
When he got near Virginia he climbed into a tree with a satisfied “Tsip!” and I left him.
He was an exquisite night singer; indeed, one of his names is the American nightingale, and one summer I had to request him to descend to the basement to sleep, as his loud night-singing disturbed a delicate neighbor. He was a very mischievous bird, and one day when I was carrying a hammer and nails about the aviary, he espied a match in the box, and darting down, flew off with it for his nest. I pursued him for a long time before I could persuade him to drop the dangerous plaything.
It is a great delight to me to reflect that these lovely cardinals can no longer be bought in the birdstores. How any one can enjoy the sight of this bright red bird, with his wild, free spirit hopping to and fro in the narrow confines of a cage, is as much of a mystery to me as the wearing of his dull and lifeless skin in a hat. We must educate our children into the conviction that a dead bird is as grotesque an ornament as a dead mouse or a dead frog.
CHAPTER XXIV
SPARROWS AND SWALLOWS
Poor little brown immigrants, how many enemies and how few friends they have, and yet what have they done to deserve so hard a fate? Merely following out the biblical instruction to multiply and increase—they always remind me of true Anglo-Saxon stock. They protect the family, they fight all strangers and, “Colonize, colonize,” is their motto.
I have had quite an extensive acquaintance with the English sparrow, both in town and in the country, and I think that this bad boy of the air has a worse name than he deserves. Undoubtedly he is bad; so are all boys, and all birds, and all men and women. We want supervision, correction, restriction—but the sparrow has good points.
Sparrow mothers lead all birds in mothering, as far as my observation goes. Again and again I have put a baby sparrow on the roof. He is a stranger picked up in the street. I do not know what nest he comes from, he does not know, no one knows. He is like the poor dog in the express car on a certain railway that ate up his tag. No one knew what place he was bound for.
Well, the instant the lost sparrow opens his little beak and gives a cry of distress, three or four mother sparrows come flying toward him with their beaks full of food. They don’t wait to see whose baby he is, as some human mothers would wait. He is a baby, and he is hungry, and they are going to feed him, and they do it until he flutters from the roof, and I have to pick him up and take care of him myself. If I put him in a cage and set him back on the roof, the street sparrows will try all day long to feed him through the bars. Yes, indeed, a mother sparrow is the best mother bird I know.