"Hullo, my boy!" I said. "I can see plainly enough what is in your mind. You know I'm watching a hole in the tree where a jackdaw has just gone in, and your intention is, when no one is about, to swarm up the tree and get the young birds."
"Oh, no," he returned. "I'm not going to climb the tree and don't want any young jackdaws. I always come to look because the birds breed in that hole every year. Two years ago I had a bird from the nest, but I don't want another."
Then at my invitation he sat down to tell me about it. One morning when he came the young had just come off, and he found one squatting on the ground under the trees, looking stupefied. No doubt when it flew out it had struck against
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a trunk or branch and come down bruised and stunned.
He wrapped it up in a handkerchief and took it home to Deal and put it in a box; then mother got some flannel and made a sort of bed for it, and warmed some milk and they opened its beak and fed it with a teaspoon. Next day it was all right and opened its beak to be fed whenever they came near it, and in two or three days it began flying about the room and perching on their shoulders. Then he brought it back to Walmer and let it go and saw it fly off into the trees, but when he got home mother scolded him for having let it go when its parents were not about; she said it would die of starvation, and was going on at him when in flew the jackdaw and came flop on her shoulder! After that mother and father said they'd keep the daw a little longer, and then he could let it go at a distance where there were other daws about. By and by they said they'd let it stay where it was. Father liked a bloater for his tea, and there was nothing the jackdaw was fonder of, so he was always on the table at tea-time, eating out of father's plate. Then he got to be troublesome. He was always
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watching for a door or window of the parlour to be opened to let the air in, and that was the room mother was so careful about, and every time he got in he'd fly straight to the mantelpiece, which was covered with photographs and ornaments. They were mostly those little things--pigs and dogs and parrots and all sorts of animals made of glass and china, and the jackdaw would begin to pick them up and throw them down on to the fender, and of course he broke a lot of them. That made mother mad, and she scolded him and told him to get rid of the bird. So he wrapped it up so as it shouldn't know where it was going and went off two or three miles along the coast, and let it go where there were other daws. It flew off and joined them, and he came home. That afternoon Jackie came back, and they wondered how he had found his way. Father said 'twas plain enough, that the bird had just followed the coast till he got back to Deal, and there he was at home. He said the only way to lose it was to take it somewhere away from the sea; so he wrapped it up again and took it to his Aunt Ellen's at Northbourne, about five miles from Deal. His aunt told him to carry