Like a long-caged bird
Thou beat'st thy bars with broken wing
And flutterest, feebly echoing
The far-off music thou hast heard,
—Arthur Eaton.
This was my last day of liberty for many, many months. The very next evening I was stunned by a stone thrown by a small boy who accompanied a hunter. Picking me up he ran toward his father, who was coming back from the neighboring swamp with his loaded gamebag.
"This bird isn't dead," said the boy, holding me up to view, "and I'm going to put it in a cage and train it to talk."
"Crows are the kind that talk. That's no crow nor no starling neither," answered the man. "Better give it to me to kill. I'll pay you a penny for it."
"Naw, you don't," and the boy drew back, at the same time closing his hand over me so tightly that I feared I would be crushed. "I'm going to keep him, I tell ye. He's mine to do what I please with, and I ain't agoing to sell him for a penny, neither."
So saying he ran along in front of his father till we reached the mule cart. Into this clumsy vehicle they climbed and soon we were jogging over the sandy road to their home. As we drove along the man computed, partly to himself, partly aloud, how much money the contents of his game-bag would bring him. The result must have been satisfactory, for presently he observed:
"Purty fair day's wages, but I believe I could make more killing terns and gulls than these birds. Bill Jones and the hunters up on Cobb's Island last year got ten cents apiece for all the gulls they killed. Forty thousand were killed right there. Oh, it's bound to be a mighty good business for us fellows as long as the wimmen are in the notion, that is, if the birds ain't all killed off."
"Air they getting scarce?" questioned the boy. The man ejected a mouthful of dark, offensive juice from between his grizzled whiskers before replying.
"Yes, purty tol'ble scarce. So much demand for 'em is bound to clean the birds out. There used to be heaps of orioles an' robins an' larks an' blackbirds an' waxwings through the country, but they're getting played out too, since the wimmen tuk to wearin' 'em on their bunnets."
"Well, no woman sha'n't have my bird for her bunnet," and the boy gave me another friendly pinch that nearly broke my bones. "I'm a going to put it in that old cage that's out in the shed and give it to Betty, if she wants it."