“You unnatural mother!” he burst forth. “You have forgotten the order of nature! You have forgotten your children! Your lovely, precious, tender, helpless little ones!” And he wept, for his highest ideals were shattered.
But the precious little ones stood there on the ridge pole and flapped their strong young wings in high derision. They were as big as he was, nearly; for as a matter of fact, he was but a young stork himself.
Then the air was beaten white with a thousand wings; it was like snow and silver and sea-foam; there was a flash, a whirlwind, a hurricane of wild joy and then the army of the sky spread wide in due array and streamed southward.
Full of remembered joy and more joyous hope, finding the sunlight better than her dreams, she swept away to the far summerland; and her children, mad with the happiness of the first flight, swept beside her.
“But you are a mother!” he panted, as he caught up with them.
“Yes,” she cried, joyously, “but I was a stork before I was a mother! and afterward!—and all the time!”
And the storks were flying.
The Doomed Men’s Message
By Mary Carolyn Davies