WOULDN'T the little readers of Birds and All Nature enjoy a talk with a mother-bird? The father-bird, it seems to me, has done all the talking hitherto. Because he is handsome and can sing is no reason why Jim, my mate, should write up the history of his family. It would have been a sorry attempt had he tried, I promise you, for though he is a Hartz Mountain Canary—pure yellow and white like the lower bird in the picture—he is not at all clever. My mistress says I have more sense in one of my little toes than Jim has in his whole body.
"You cute little thing," she exclaims when I kiss her, or take a hemp seed from off her finger, "you are the dearest and wisest little bird in the world."
Jim sometimes taunts me because I wear such sober colors—black and brown with green and yellow mixed—like the upper bird in the picture—but I retort that I am a Hartz Mountain bird, also, and have just as good German blood in my veins as he has. Neither of us ever saw the Hartz Mountains, of course, for we were born in Chicago, but our great grandmothers did, I am sure.
A good husband? No, I can't say that Jim is. He is too quarrelsome. My mistress says he is a bully, whatever that may mean. He has a fashion of standing by the seed cup and daring me to come and pick up a seed; the same with the drinking-water and the bathing-dish. Then again he is very gracious, and calls me pet names, and sings at the top of his voice every love song he knows. Sometimes I try to imitate him, when he flies into a rage and sharply bids me "shut up." I am too meek to return the compliment, even when I have grown weary of his music, but my mistress shakes her finger at him and calls him a "naughty, naughty bird."
She can't tame Jim, all she may do. Few canary birds will resist a hemp seed when offered on a finger. My mistress used to crack them between her teeth and coax and coax him to take one, but he never would. That's the reason she calls him stupid, for we love hemp seed just as you little folks love peanuts, you know. That's the way she tamed me, and that's the way you can tame your canary if you have one.
I have had a rather eventful history for a bird. In the first place—but let me begin at the beginning and tell you the circumstance just as it happened.
It was about four years ago, so far as I can recollect, that I caught my first glimpse of the world and tasted the sweets of freedom. One balmy morning in June, I escaped from my cage, and the window being open, out I joyously flew into the bright sunshine. I was a little dazzled at first and frightened. How immense the world seemed! How far away the tender blue sky over which the fleecy clouds sailed, that sky which I had thought a mere patch when seen from my cage in the window! How many houses there were, and how inviting the green trees and grass-plots! I fairly danced with joy, and chirped, "I'm free, I'm free," as I flew from place to place, my wings, never tiring, bearing me from tree to housetop and from housetop to tree.
Ah, that was a day never to be forgotten. How I escaped the dangers which lurk about the steps of the unwary and innocent has always been a marvel to me. The hostile sparrows, for instance, the green-eyed, sharp-clawed cat, the sling-shot of the cruel boy, the—but why linger over horrors which might, but did not happen?
In this way the morning passed joyfully, the pangs of hunger, as noon approached, however, advising me sharply it was near dinner time. From housetop to housetop I flew, from tree to tree, but nowhere could I find a little china cup filled with rape, hemp, and canary seed, or a tiny glass vessel filled with water that I might slake my thirst.