“So saying, he flew away to a neighboring garden, while I thought how good he was to me, an entire stranger, though I did wish he would not call me miss. It made me feel ashamed when I remembered Mr. Red and the nest among the jasmine.
“When my mistress came to see me, after breakfast, bringing the usual sweet potato, and broiled fish and bits of bread, she found a part of a bug in my cage, and a piece of fig which my new friend had found near one of the dining-room windows and brought to me. Great was her wonder as to where it came from, but as I could not talk to her, though able to understand all she said, I do not suppose she ever knew about the robin who came to see me every morning before there was much stir in the hotel, and kept me so well supplied with such things as I liked, that I began to recover my health and my spirits, too, though my heart was always aching for the nest up the river, and the babies I left in it. Gradually, too, I began to have a great liking for Mr. Red-Breast, as I called him at first, though he insisted that I should say Robin, as that was more familiar. At home they all called him Robin, and no one ever mistered him, he said, except Mrs. Robin, when she began to help him build the nest in the mountain ash, which he told me grew in the garden where he lived at the North.
CHAPTER III.
ROBIN’S HOME.
“One morning when he came to see me as usual, complaining of the heat, and saying he should soon be starting for home if the weather continued like this, he found me very sad and anxious, for only the night before I had heard my mistress say that she intended taking me North with her, and should, perhaps, give me to a friend who had asked her to bring her a bird from the South. This was a deathblow to all my hopes, for as day after day I had watched the piles of baggage and the crowds of people which left the hotel, and heard the waiters say they were starting for home, I thought to myself the day will come when my mistress will go, too, and then she will surely set me free, and I fancied the surprise and joy of Mr. Red and the little ones, when I flew down upon them some evening.”
“About how long was this after your capture?” asked the Paroquet, and Mrs. Red replied:
“Three, or four, or five weeks. I don’t quite remember.”
“Ah!” and Mr. Paroquet nodded very knowingly. “I reckon he might have been surprised to see you, and glad, of course, very glad, and Miss Spotted-Wing, too, for she was at the jasmine nest every day by that time, helping take care of the children, and must have been pretty well tired out.”
“Yes,” and Mrs. Red spoke sorry-like, as she always did when Spotted-Wing was mentioned, but if she understood the Paroquet’s meaning she gave no sign, and went on with her story.
“All my hopes were blasted now, for if my mistress took me away with her that was the end to my dream of freedom, and I was feeling so wretched and heart-sick when Robin came, as usual, and to him I told my trouble, asking what the North was like, and if, as I had heard, it snowed there all the time, though what snow was I did not then know, any more than you knew what icicles were when you asked if they grew on Christmas trees.