Philip Brown,
Pigeon Book,
but not in any ordinary, plain, little bits of letters! Each capital was topped off with an arrow, and ended with a feather, and even the small letters had a thick blanket of dots.
The first entry was as follows:
April 7th.—I wocked out to Crane's, and got 2 fantales. they are hard to ketch. I payed 25 scents. My father knailed a box on the stable, and I put in a bed of straw, they are bootiful. my sister would not let me have her vale, but I got one prettier. they look woozy.
The next day, Sunday, Philip did not see how he could go to church or Sunday-school—he had not time, he said, but his mother agreed to watch the pigeons, and so his religious obligations did not need to be set aside.
Monday afternoon the Browns' back yard was full of little boys inspecting Philip's pigeons, not merely idle onlookers, but hard-headed poultry fanciers, as shown by the following entry:
April 9th.—I sold a pare of white ones to-day to Wilfred Garbett, to be kept three weeks after birth, Eva Gayton wants a pare too any color, in July. She paid for them.
Under this entry, which was made laboriously in ink, there was another one, in lead pencil, done by Philip's brother, Jack:
This is called selling Pigeons short.
Philip's friends recommended many and varied things for the pigeons to eat, and he did his best to supply them all, as far as his slender means allowed; he went to the elevator for wheat; he traded his good jack-knife for two mouse-eaten and anaemic heads of squaw-corn, which were highly recommended by an unscrupulous young Shylock, who had just come to town and was short of a jack-knife. His handkerchief, scribblers and pencils mysteriously disappeared, but other articles came in their place: a small round mirror advertising corsets on the back (Gordon Smith said pigeons liked a looking-glass—it made them more contented to stay at home); a small swing out of a birdcage, which was duly put in place (vendor Miss Edie Beal, owner unknown). Of course, it was too small for pigeons, but there were going to be little ones very soon, weren't there?