THE CANARY'S STORY.
Am I happy? No, not quite happy, though I sing as if I were. Do you think that a cage would make you happy if you had wings?
I am willing to say that I am grateful. Helen is very good to me. She never forgets to fill my seed-cup and my glass of water. Every morning I have my bath and my cage is cleaned. At night I am taken into a cool, dark room to sleep. If the house is too warm I am very uncomfortable, and Helen is careful to keep my sleeping-room cool.
Sometimes Helen takes me out of the cage for a while. It is a great pleasure to fly in and out among the plants in the window. I pretend that I am in the woods. For a time I am very happy.
I was a wretched little bird when Helen's mother bought me. For days I had been in a tiny wooden box, with no chance to move about. Every morning a man took several of these boxes in his hand and walked up and down the streets crying, "Birds! Singing birds! Only two dollars!" He swung the boxes back and forth until I was sick and dizzy. It seemed to me that I could never sing again.
Then Helen saw me and begged her mother to give the man two dollars, so that she could take me out of the hot sun and the narrow box. How big and bright this cage seemed then!
I am never cold and hungry, it is true, but sometimes I try to fancy how it would seem to be free, to fly where I like under the open sky, and to have other birds near by. I dream of waving branches and distant mountain-tops. I can almost hear the sea pounding on the sunny beaches of those warm islands where I first saw the light. Do you think, if you were I, you could be quite happy?
THE CAGED THRUSH.
Alas for the bird who was born to sing!
They have made him a cage; they have clipped his wing;
They have shut him up in a dingy street,
And they praise his singing and call it sweet;
But his heart and his song are saddened and filled
With the woods and the nest he never will build,
And the wild young dawn coming into the tree,
And the mate that never his mate will be;
And day by day, when his notes are heard,
They freshen the street, but—alas for the bird!
R. F. MURRAY.
In the "Academy."