“Ah me!” sighed my mother, who was always coiled up in a ball on her nest. “You yourself, dear, were you not a charming good-for-nothing in your youth? Our little pet will grow up to be the best of our brood.”
While taking my part, my mother felt inward qualms as she saw my callow down grow to feathers; but, like all mothers, her heart warmed to the child least favoured by nature, and she instinctively sought to shield me from the cruel world.
When I was moulting, for the first time my father became quite pensive, and considered me attentively. While my down fell off he even treated me with some degree of favour, but as soon as my poor cold wings received their covering, as each white feather appeared, he became so furious that I dreaded his plucking me alive. Having no mirror, I remained ignorant of the cause of his wrath, and was at a loss to account for the studied unkindness of the best of parents. One day, filled with joy by a beam of sunlight and the warmth of my new coat, I left the nest, and alighting in the garden, burst into song. Instantly my father darted down from his perch with the velocity of a rocket.
“What do I hear?” he cried. “Is that meant for a Blackbird’s whistle? Is it thus I sing? Do you call that song?”
Returning to my mother with a most dangerous expression lurking round his beak, “Unfortunate! who has invaded our nest? who laid that egg?”
At these words my good mother jumped from her nest fired by proud resentment. In doing so she fell and hurt her leg; she wished to speak, but her heart was too full for words. She fell to the ground fainting.
Frightened and trembling, I cast myself at my father’s feet. “O my father!” I said, “if I whistle out of tune, and am clothed in white, do not punish my poor mother. Is it her fault that nature has not tuned my ear like yours? Is it her fault that I have not your yellow beak and glossy black coat, which recall a sleek parson swallowing an omelette? If Heaven has made me a monster, and if some one must bear the punishment, let me be the only sufferer.”
“That is not the question,” said my father. “Who taught you to whistle against rule?”
“Alas! sir,” I said humbly, “I whistled as best I could, because my breast was full of sunshine and stomach full of grubs.”
