Birds and Beasts

Translated by A. R. Allinson from the French of Camille Lemonnier

Illustrated by
E. J. Detmold

London: George Allen & Company, Ltd.
Ruskin House, Rathbone Place. Mcmxi

[All rights reserved]

Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh

Contents and Illustrations

PAGE [Jack and Murph] 1 [The Captive Goldfinch] 53 [Strange Adventures of a Little White Rabbit] 91 [“Monsieur Friquet”] 106 [A Lost Dog] 133 [Misadventures of an Owl] 156

Birds and Beasts

JACK AND MURPH

Jack and Murph

I

Jack and Murph were friends, old friends, trusty and tried.

It was now nearly six years since the day chance had brought them together as members of the same company. Jack had come straight from the African forests; he had crossed the seas, and set foot on the continent of Europe for the first time; his amazement knew no bounds.

It is not for nothing a little fellow of his sort is torn from the freedom of his vagabond life in the woods and surrendered to the tender mercies of a showman of performing animals. He learned to know the cruel tedium of captivity; shut up in a cage, he thought sadly of his merry gambols in the tree-tops; his little face grew wan and withered, and he came near pining to death. But time damped the keenness of his grief; by dint of seeing around him other little creatures that, like himself, had wearied for their native wilds, then little by little had grown reconciled to their fate, and now seemed to get a prodigious amount of fun out of their new life, he made the best of the bars, the tainted air of the booth, and the clown’s grimaces, rehearsing his drolleries before the animals’ cages.

At the same time he could never quite share the gaiety of his companions in misfortune. While they were enjoying everlasting games of hide-and-seek, scuffling, squabbling, pelting each other with nuts, he would cower timidly in a corner, too sad at heart to join in their noisy merriment. Sometimes, when his feelings grew too much for him, he would break out in a series of sharp, shrill outcries, or wail like a new-born babe in his doleful despair.

The master was very fond of him, for he was both intelligent and teachable. In a very short time he learned to do his musket drill, to walk the slack-rope, and use the spring-board. But these accomplishments only earned him the ill-will of the other pupils. There was never a prank they did not play him. No sooner had he cracked a nut, to eat the kernel, than a hand would dart over his shoulder and snatch the morsel just as he was putting it between his teeth. They slapped his face, pinched his tail, scarified his head with their nails, jumped upon him, or half strangled him in a corner, till a day came at last when his master, noticing how he was bullied, put him in a separate cage all by himself. But this loneliness only made him more unhappy still; he spent his life in lamentation, sitting stock-still all day long, with his arms hanging limp, and his eyes fixed on vacancy, refusing either to eat or drink. This would never do; so they left him at liberty to wander at will in the house.

II

Oh! but this house was not a bit like mine or yours; yet it had doors and windows like any other house, but so tiny these doors and windows were, they were hardly worth mentioning. Imagine a house on four wheels, and no higher than a man of middle size, with three little windows high up admitting light and air from outside; you entered by a wooden staircase that looked more like the ladder of a windmill than anything else.

This queer construction rolled most part of the year along the high roads, jolting, gee-wo, gee-hup! in and out of the ruts, and carting about in its interior men and animals, to say nothing of household stuff—beds, cooking-stoves, chests crammed with clothes, and a whole heap of other things. An old horse, who was little better than a bag of bones, was in the shafts; when a halt was called, they let him crop the grass alongside the hedgerows.

It was the funniest thing, being hauled along like this, tossing and tumbling in this box on wheels where the furniture seemed to be always just on the point of starting a polka. The table would throw up its legs in the air, and the chairs turn head over heels, while the pots and pans knocked together in the corners, making the quaintest music, sharp or flat in key according to the jolts.

Jack, perched atop of a big press, held on tooth and nail to save a tumble. More often than not he found himself under the table along with his good friend Murph, a Stoic philosopher, who let nothing ever disturb his equanimity, but calmly went on beating the bush of his thick woolly coat in search of the game that lived there. All the while the caravan, bumping and thumping with a terrific rattle, was tacking and luffing over the rolling billows of the stony roads.

III

It is high time to tell you that Jack was a dear, pretty little monkey of the chimpanzee kind, with tiny, delicate hands, nervous and semi-transparent, almost like a sick child’s. He was no bigger, the whole body of him, than a pocket-handkerchief, and you could have easily hidden him inside your hat. He was slim and slender, daintily made, with narrow chest and sloping shoulders—a creature all nerves, with a wonderful little pale phiz of his own, puckered and wrinkled, and long, drooping eyelids, greyish-white, and as thin as an onion skin, that slowly, rhythmically, opened and closed over brown eyes ringed with yellow. He bore the solemn, serious look of those who suffer; his eyes seemed fixed on something beyond the visible world, and now and again he would pass his long, dry fingers across his eyes as if to wipe away a tear. He seldom gambolled, and never indulged in the grotesque contortions of other apes; their restless, ceaseless activity seemed foreign to his nature, and even his grimaces had nothing in common with theirs.

Noise scared him; he was never angry, but habitually silent and thoughtful. He preferred to lurk alone in dark corners, where he would spend long hours, squatted on his tail, almost motionless, dreaming sadly of some mysterious, unattainable future. But, for all his unlikeness to his colleagues and their comicality, his queer little crumpled, wrinkled face never failed to produce its effect on the spectators. Jack was perfectly irresistible; no one could look at him for any length of time without bursting out laughing. His aspect was at once so piteous and so ridiculous, his gaze so pathetic and so grotesque, his deadly earnestness so side-splitting, while his eyelids would droop suddenly ever and anon in so anxious and appealing a wink, that the result was comic beyond belief. An old, old man’s head on a baby’s body, a mask that was for ever changing, twitching, wrinkling, with eyes that looked out grave, intense, solemn, from beneath a low, flat brow crowned by what looked for all the world like a wig!

The louder the merriment he excited, the more serious Jack became. On show days, while the audience was convulsed with mirth, the gravity of his mien, the careworn look in his eyes, over which the lids dropped mechanically at regular intervals, as if weighed down with their load of melancholy, reached the acme of fantastic absurdity.

Alas! men cannot tell what monkeys are thinking of. If they knew, they would not always laugh. Jack was dreaming of the sun, the vast green forests, the friends he had left behind; he was dreaming of the delights of swinging high in the air, cradled in the leafy hammocks of the boughs, dreaming of the trailing lianas, of the romps and games with his fellows throwing cocoanuts at one another’s heads, and of the endless chivyings and chasings from tree-top to tree-top above the rolling billows of the wind-tossed jungles, through which the wild beasts—elephants, panthers, and lions—plough their way like ships on the high seas, leaving in their wake a broad furrow of floating odours and deep-toned sounds.

IV

But Jack had a friend, and he never embarked on his voyages into the far-away dreamland without calling on his old chum Murph to join him.

Yes, Murph gambolled with him in the tropical jungles, Murph frolicked with him in the tall grasses, Murph and he amused themselves together at never-ending games of play; if ever it was granted him to see his native land again, he fully hoped to take Murph along with him.

Poor Jack! he did not understand that the worthy Murph, acrobat as he was, would have found it hard to follow him in the lofty regions where his congeners are wont to disport themselves, nearer to the stars than the earth. Not a doubt of it, Murph would have had to kick his heels at the foot of a tree, while his friend was off and away aloft; and the smallest of his perils would have been to find himself, on looking round, face to face with a python-snake, just uncoiling his folds to spring, or else, on the river-banks, confronted with the gaping jaws of a crocodile.

Murph could play dominoes, tell fortunes, hunt for a handkerchief in a spectator’s pocket, read the paper. Murph had many other accomplishments besides, but it is far from certain that he would have extricated himself successfully from a tête-à-tête of this sort with beasts that could boast neither his education nor his manners.

The liking was reciprocal. From the very first Jack had taken a fancy to the big woolly-coated dog, as woolly as a sheep, who never barked or growled or grumbled or showed his teeth—so unlike the other dogs in the menagerie; in the same way Murph, the big dog, had formed an affection for the well-behaved, sad-faced little ape, who never pulled his tail and never tried to scratch out his eyes.

As it happened, the showman had made up his mind to make them perform together. Murph was the best runner in the troupe; there was nobody like him for a round trot or a swinging gallop, for wheeling suddenly round and dropping to his knees just before making his exit, nobody to match Murph, always good-tempered and imperturbable, always on the look-out, with his bright eyes half hid under the bushy eyebrows, for a bit of sugar and a round of applause.

Jack, for his part, had very soon become a brilliant horseman, lissom and fearless, an adept at leaping through the hoops and vaulting the bars. Thus the two seemed made for each other, both in body and mind. They bore the hardships of the life together, and they shared its successes; by dint of standing so often back against back and muzzle against muzzle, they found their hearts brought close together too, and became fast friends. Murph was never to be seen without Jack; wherever Jack was, Murph was there as well; they lived curled up on the same rug, in the same corner, under the same table, Murph licking Jack in the neck, and Jack stroking Murph’s nose, each bound to each in perfect trust and amity.

V

Murph was older than Jack by nearly nine years, and his years made him nearly as serious-minded as his friend. But it was a different sort of gravity. Murph was neither morose nor disillusioned; his was the gentle seriousness of old age. He had seen many things since he had been in the world, but life did not appear to have left only its dregs in him. He still believed in springtide, in friendship, in the master’s kind heart; then he had neither family nor native land to regret, for he had been born in the menagerie of a father and mother broken in like himself to circle the trapeze and leap through the hoop.

His horizon was bounded by the four walls of the caravan in which, as a puppy still sucking at his mother’s breast, he had been carted from fair to fair. Day by day he had watched from behind the window-panes the long procession of cities and countries filing past; he had visited most parts of Europe, in company with the strange omnium-gatherum of apes, goats, parrots, and dogs that at each halting-place was the delight of the infant population. But he had never taken it upon him to covet the kingdom of this world; he had never craved to roam at liberty through the streets; never, in one word, had he so much as dreamt of playing truant. He was a very learned dog, and, like other learned people, he lived absorbed in his own thoughts, self-centred within the circle of his meditations, seeking nothing of things outside.

VI

Murph was a poodle by breed, and you might have searched long before you found a bigger or better-built one. Standing well on his legs, with a good, strong, supple back of his own, he carried his head high, as a self-respecting poodle should. I mean, of course, in the days when Murph was still young, for since age had crept on him, it would droop more or less; but even so, there was something proud and dignified about its carriage that always attracted attention. He walked slowly and sedately, as if intent on the solution of an ever-insoluble problem. His thick, curly fleece clothed his neck like a mane, while a stout pair of long drooping moustaches gave him the look of an old cavalry officer; his skin was smooth and polished where the coat had been cut very close; he wore heavy ruffles round his ankles, and his tail ended in a woolly tuft.

Thus accoutred, Murph was a fine-looking dog; the curs of low degree that came prowling round the van, and caught a glimpse of him through the crack of the door, gazed at him with admiration. He had the majestic port of beings destined to greatness; it was easy to see he might have been a diplomatist, or a great general, if nature, in fashioning his lot, had not chosen rather to give him the shape of a poodle; nor was Murph slow to appreciate and enjoy the impression he produced.

Fine fellow as he was, he was not altogether free from vanity; the humblest animal with which Murph compared himself was the lion; he had seen one once in a travelling menagerie, and been struck by his own likeness to the king of beasts. Why, had he not, like the lion, a mane about his neck, a tuft to his tail, and bracelets of hair about his ankles? Had he not likewise his Olympian look and superb carriage? By dint of a little imagination, Murph had come to believe the lion a degenerated type of poodle dog.

But let us pass lightly over his foibles; every one has his little weaknesses. Time, moreover, that damps the foolish ardour of mankind and dogkind, had tamed our friend’s ambitions. He was by now as contemplative and calm as some wise philosopher satiated with the glories of this world. More often on his back than on his feet, he would watch the younger dogs, his juniors in the profession, capering and giving themselves the airs of a drum-major heading his regiment, without any other feeling towards them but one of kindly indulgence; and if any one else was disposed to rebuke them, he would shake his head, as much as to say, “There, there, we have all of us done the like in our day!”

VII

Jack had come as a solace to his old age; he had loved him as a friend, almost as a son, with a truly fatherly affection.

This little suffering, delicate creature, so morbidly nervous and excitable, had roused in him some mysterious instinct of protection, that had grown little by little and ended by forming an unbreakable bond of brotherhood. Ceaselessly he watched over his protégé, sheltered him, defended him, kept for him the best of his bodily heat and his warm heart. If a bullying animal ran after Jack, in one bound the latter was beside Murph, who would show a determined front, that soon sent the would-be tormentor to the right-about. One day, indeed, Murph, usually so good-tempered, showed his teeth to the master himself, who, for some small fault, had thought good to lift his whip at the little monkey. If Jack was a-cold—and he was always shivering, blow the wind from what quarter it might—quick he would slip between Murph’s paws and cuddle against his breast in the warm, cosy place. Murph was Jack’s special providence.

Thus they had been living for nearly half-a-dozen years. Never a cloud had dimmed their good accord; never an angry snap of the teeth—never a pettish fit; mankind might have taken a lesson in the art of friendship from them. Thus they had grown old, loving, fondling, helping each other, making between them the prettiest happy family ever known in the world, never weary one of the other, but realising the ideal of the most perfect union.

Mutual esteem further increased their affection. Murph had never seen an ape more alert and clever, more intelligent and active than Jack; he would gladly have stood for hours watching him performing his tricks, clinging to the cords with his delicate, dry little hands, then hurling himself into space to alight again on his feet, or else holding on by his tail and swinging from earth to heaven on the trapeze.

On his side Jack—Jack the cynic, whose lack-lustre eyes seemed incapable of any curiosity—admired his friend Murph as a creature of extraordinary gifts.

And what wonderful things the good dog could do, to be sure! I have mentioned some of them; I could tell of many others. Murph could climb a ladder; Murph could walk along a line of bottle necks; Murph could nose out the prettiest lady in the audience; Murph could play the cornet-à-piston; Murph could smoke a pipe; Murph was almost a man.

VIII

It did one good to see him “come on,” a big pink bow knotted in the tufts that adorned his tail. He would enter gravely, bow politely to right and left, then cast a questioning look at his master, quite motionless the while, except for a slight quiver of the tail, waiting for the conclusion of the introductory remarks which the “old man” never failed to address to the audience. At last came the loud “Hi, Murph!”—and the good dog began his evening’s work.

He could have given points to the most experienced actors by his aplomb, his punctiliousness, his patient and never-flagging attention. Nothing ever distracted him from his part. Wags would amuse themselves sometimes by offering him a lump of sugar, or even pitch a sausage or a cake right between his paws; but Murph was adamant against such temptations. How the crowd cheered and clapped hands and stamped feet when he went bounding from hoop to hoop, so supple and nimble and self-possessed, never losing step or missing a spring, striking the paper with his head fair and square in the middle every time, crashing through and landing again on his feet, gravely and yet so elegantly.

His tricks finished, he would repeat his bows to right and left, still quite sedate and unintoxicated by the thunders of applause. The fact is, Murph respected both his audience and himself; he knew how to keep his feelings to himself—how different from those ill-trained dogs that yelp and bark and lose their heads in the hurly-burly, quite forgetting that the finest thing on earth is to take one’s triumph modestly.

IX

But Murph was particularly admirable in the tricks he went through with Jack. Each of the two friends seemed made to help out the other, and each vied with the other in sacrificing himself to enhance the general effect. Now it was “Mazeppa’s ride”; you know—Mazeppa bound on the back of his fiery charger and borne on and on in wild career over the steppes in a whirlwind of flying stones and smothering dust. Now it was a powder-play of Bedouins, pursuing, retreating, prancing, curvetting, rising in their stirrups and brandishing their muskets; or else a mortal combat between two troops of horse, firing at each other, reloading and firing again. The spectacle, whatever it was, was always thrilling.

Murph would stand waiting in the side-scenes for his cue. Suddenly he would give a spring, a tremendous spring, and like a bomb-shell he was on the stage, with mane erect and flashing eyes; clearing every obstacle, upsetting everything he encountered, animate or inanimate, he hurled himself on to the boards; on his back, clinging to his woolly coat, shaking and shivering, teeth hard set and mouth awry, rode a little black figure wrapped in a voluminous burnous that flapped in the wind.

And bing! bang! bang! as his steed dashed by, with all the flash and dazzle of red saddle braided with gold, scarlet bridle, and red, green, blue spangles, shaking the boards, rattling the lustres, rustling the curtain, to reiterated cries of “Hi! hip! hurrah, hurrah!” and the crack of the whip going off like pistol-shots behind, Jack would fire off his gun over and over again, till he was shrouded in a cloud of smoke, through which he could be discerned still tireless, still indefatigable, bestriding Murph in every possible position, now perched on the neck, now on the crupper. He seemed made of iron, the frail little being! Murph might prance and jib and shy, buck-jump and leap fences—nothing could unseat Jack. The performance over, the latter would shake his little head under its jockey-cap two or three times, by way of bow, and so exit, as his friend the poodle gave one last tremendous bound that carried him and his rider out of sight.

The enthusiasm of the spectators followed him behind the scenes, and the floor trembled and shook under the drumming of heavy boots. The applause grew deafening, and suddenly Jack and Murph made a final whirlwind dash across the stage, executed a last frantic fantasia—and retired for good and all.

X

But, alas! Murph was getting old. His exertions tired him dreadfully; after each performance he had to be rubbed down and attended to, or he would have lain moaning and groaning for an hour.

His master was sorry for him, and with deep regret—for he saw no glimpse among his troupe of any talent to take the place of the “falling star”—he set him to do his more quiet tricks—playing dominoes, finding handkerchiefs, walking on bottles.

At the same time he resolved to try a young poodle to fill the hole in the receipts his good, faithful Murph’s retirement was bound to make. He trained the animal to run in circles, to leap through hoops, to clear obstacles, and one fine day clapped Jack on his back.

Banco—that was the poodle’s name—had not gone three steps before he was bitten, beaten, garrotted, and left blinded and bleeding. The master punished Jack severely, and presently made a fresh attempt. But, no—Jack would not obey; he tore Banco’s ear in two, and then sprang from the saddle and hid himself in a dark corner.

Much the same thing happened at every new trial. The whip was no sort of use; Jack was not to be moved. At last, wearied out, the showman gave in, and Jack and Murph remained inseparable, living and working together as before.

One night Murph came in from his performance utterly worn out, his tongue hanging out of his mouth and his strength exhausted; his midday meal had proved indigestible, and, to cap all, the applause to-night had been faint and feeble.

Ah! few of us know how actors live on that elusive thing, the favour of the public, and what renewed force, when they are grown old and have one foot in the grave already, what fresh vigour the smiles of a delighted audience instil in their veins, when the blood is beginning to run feeble!

No, the thankless audience did not for once acknowledge Murph as their old favourite, the veteran of the boards, the good and gallant beast that had so often been their darling and their delight. Under his outward show of indifference Murph hid a vast fund of sensibility, and the coldness of his audience cut him to the quick, coming so soon after his late successes. He thought the dark night of public neglect was beginning for him; he realised his loss of vigour, his waning energies, and, like other old players, he saw himself superannuated, out of date, unknown, and misunderstood by a new public, become a mere shadow on the scene of his former triumphs. Add to this his master’s evident ill-humour, as he foresaw the inevitable moment when his old servant would be a mere pensioner on his bounty.

Murph staggered off, and fell panting on the rug that formed his bed.

Then Jack came to help him; but, alas! even Jack could not console him just at first. Murph rejected his friend’s ministrations, so bitter was his rancour against mankind. But his pique was soon over, and his wounded heart found healing under the gentle hand of his lifelong companion.

XI

But the fatal hour had struck; old age was upon him. Murph had grown infirm; he would take a dozen steps, crawling from one corner to another, and then sink down helplessly. His legs, once so prodigiously strong and active, tottered and stumbled from sheer weakness. In vain his master’s voice called him to show his tricks; he would struggle to his feet, for an instant his head would recover its proud carriage of old days; then suddenly, his momentary strength exhausted, his limbs tingling with rheumatic pains that cut like whip-lashes, he would slink away to fall back again into the lifeless attitude of an aged invalid.

A cloud floated before his eyes, he could no longer see things clearly, and a growing deafness filled his head with a buzz-buzzing that never stopped. Life was slowly dying down in the old body. He would lie torpid for hours and doze away the time in dark corners, under tables, where nothing would wake him, neither the yapping of the other dogs nor the chattering of the monkeys, neither the noise of footsteps coming and going nor the shrill trumpetings of the clown’s cornet-à-piston playing “Malbrouck s’en va-t-en guerre!”

It was a deep, dreamless sleep. Jack did not like it, and would crouch down beside him, watching him with sad eyes, like a friend at a sick man’s bedside. Poor beast, he could make nothing of this new state of affairs. Some change he could not comprehend had come over his chum and laid him low. He seemed to be mutely questioning him, asking him why he never nowadays trotted about behind the scenes. But it was all Murph could do to see his little anxious, sorrowful face; he could only view him as if through a fog, an indistinct shape of sympathy hardly distinguishable from surrounding objects.

Nevertheless, he still tried hard to make out in the dusk of his blindness his kindly comrade of yore; he would raise his palsied head, and from the depths of his dim eyes, veiled by a milky film, dart a pale look of infinite gentleness.

Sometimes the two bushy tufts on his forehead dropped right over his eyes and further confused his vision. But Jack would put them back lightly with the tips of his delicate fingers. Indeed he never left his side, tickling his ears to amuse him, tapping and stroking him, ever on the watch, a tender-hearted nurse of inexhaustible care and foresight.

This lowly being had learnt to love like a mother; his little dim soul had emerged from its darkness to answer his dying comrade’s need, and now, shining bright in the light of day, was working deeds of charity.

XII

One evening the show pitched on the outskirts of a big town. The booth was raised, the trestles fixed, the boards laid, and the costume-chests emptied of their miscellaneous finery.

Murph lay curled up by himself behind the stove; all round him reigned a deafening uproar, a rush and scurry of feet, a perfect hurricane of noise. The master was shouting and scolding; the Jack-pudding with his hoarse voice was yelping like a dog, mewing like a cat, crowing like a cock, getting into trim for the patter-speech with which to tickle the ears of the groundlings, while the general hands were bustling about, nailing and hammering, stimulated by copious libations of wine.

The monkeys, too, bore their part; hearing all this uproar, they joined in with a will. Their shrill scolding rose above the hammering, and they chattered incessantly and shook the bars of their cages. The dogs barked, a solemn-faced parrot repeated a bad word over and over again, while the musicians hired for the evening performance drew lugubrious notes from their instruments by way of keeping their hand in.

Hurrah! the stage was set up at last.

Then the dogs were dressed, the seats given a last wipe-down—and suddenly boom! boom! the big drum, furiously beaten, rolled out its deep-toned summons. Instantly a perfect hurricane of discordant, ear-splitting noises was let loose in front of the show-tent. Answering the deafening rumble of the big drum, the fifes and ophicleide awoke, the kettledrum began its rub-a-dub, the cymbals clashed, and the whole booth shivered and shook from floor to roof-tree.

Shouts, yells, bursts of ribald laughter, combined in one deep-toned, incessant roar to form the bass, while cat-calls, cries of vituperation and repartee, the trampling of many feet marking time before the doors, the clown’s voice rising and falling amid a tempest of scuffling and kicking, all met and mingled in the air above the red glow of the pitch-pine torches flaring in the wind, and punctuating the general din one never-ceasing refrain—

“First seats one franc; second seats half a franc; third places twenty centimes—only twenty centimes. Walk up, ladies and gentlemen; just about to begin! Citizens and soldiers, walk up, walk up!”

XIII

A torrent of humanity surged up the steps, pushing, shoving, shouting; then, suddenly released, poured tumultuously over the seats of the auditorium. Then the big drum redoubled its efforts, the fife blew its shrillest, the ophicleide lost all control of its keys, tom-toms and hand-bells, frantically beaten, added their quota to the din, the kettledrums made a terrific rub-a-dub, and the whole force of the company, a mad whirl of startling colours and flashing spangles, danced a fandango on the platform.

“Walk up, gentlemen, walk up!” the master-showman kept yelling; “here you shall see what you shall see—marvels and miracles you’ve never seen the like of before! Look at me! I am the world-famous Brinzipoff, director-in-chief to the Royal Theatre of St. Petersburg and to all the crowned heads of Europe! Hi! ho! hup! only twenty centimes the back seats! Halloa! ha! hurrah! here you are, here you are, ladies and gentlemen, this way for the front seats!”

A pause of comparative calm succeeded this grand chorus of ear-splitting noises.

The close-packed audience was waiting, stamping with impatience, for the curtain to rise. Then Jack-pudding came on, pulled his funny faces, and let off his jokes amidst a dropping fire of jeers and bravos, and presently made way for Esmeralda, the performing goat, “the unique, the incomparable Esmeralda, the very same identical animal described by the immortal Alexandre Hugo!” The musicians struck up an appropriate air, mostly made up of the vigorous thumping of drumsticks on drumheads.

XIV

Murph had never budged from his corner; he was quite insensible as yet to the din that had once had such power to excite him. His head resting on his outstretched paws, he lay asleep, stolid and stupid, callous to all external things. Round his neck, buried in the dirty, matted fleece, now long untouched by the curry-comb, were wound Jack’s arms; for Jack never left his side.

Esmeralda made her exit, and then suddenly bombarding the audience with a tornado of sound, the big drum rolled again, as if to announce some special and extraordinary turn.

Murph knew this furious, frantic prelude well; this was always the way Mazeppa’s headlong ride began. Yes, next moment, fifes, drums, bells, tom-toms struck up together in a mad concert of all the instruments combined, whereby the bandsmen strove to depict poor Mazeppa’s terrors as his galloping steed bore him off to be the prey of all the fiends of hell!

XV

Then something stirred in the old dog’s brain. Did he recall his former triumphs, the shouts of excited audiences, the encores, all the intoxicating successes of his life on the boards? Did some vision of an applauding multitude, of arms outstretched, and voices raised in gratitude, amid the crash of trumpet and drum, in the hot air thick with men’s breath and the fumes of powder—did some vision of all this pass before the poodle’s dying eyes?

It was a strange awakening, at any rate. Murph sprang suddenly to his feet, took a leap, and bounded on the stage, tail proudly swinging, and head erect, Jack hanging on to his woolly coat. Delighted, entranced, amazed, the poor little beast kept craning over to peer into his comrade’s face, to see if it was really true, and watch the light of life dawning and brightening in his deep-set eyes.

So his friend was himself again at last! So they were to begin the old merry life again, to gallop and leap, and risk their necks as in the dear, daredevil days of yore! Jack danced and pranced on the poodle’s back, as if drunk with the delight of this miraculous transformation.

At sight of this great, hollow-flanked, unkempt beast, with his dirty, greasy, tangled fleece, standing there stark and stiff, his legs tottering under him, his body shaken from head to foot by a nervous tremor, paws sprawling, back bending, a few scanty hairs bristling in his tail—when the crowd beheld this pitiful ruin, to which Jack, alert and debonair, Jack and his grimaces and contortions, Jack and his caresses, the tender eyes he made, and the close, loving embrace he cast about his comrade’s neck, all added a touch of comedy, at once sad and irresistibly ludicrous, a mighty shout of laughter arose.

It burst like a rocket, then spread from row to row of the spectators, till it ended in a tempest of merriment that from the audience extended to the stage, and burst on the dying comedian who stood there.

Suddenly the dog’s legs gave way beneath him, and Murph fell over on his side. His supreme effort had killed him; he had succumbed, as great men sometimes will, at the very moment of their greatness.

He lay there, the death-rattle in his throat, the death-agony shaking his poor body in a last, dreadful spasm. He opened his eyes wide, unnaturally wide, in a stony, sightless stare, as empty as the heads of the thoughtless crowd in front.

Then they came and dragged him off the scene.

XVI

Jack was farther from understanding things than ever; his wonder had only increased.

Why had his friend stopped short when so well under way? He could not tell; he could only gaze at him with questioning eyes, his eyelids winking very fast in a startled way.

He pressed closer and closer to Murph, and felt a shock as of something snapping, a shudder, the quiver of a breaking chain. A deeper darkness still crept over poor Murph’s senses; he was dying!

Jack crouched over him, gazing down at his friend.

Just then Murph made a supreme effort, half turned his head and peered up in his friend’s face, while a look of tender affection passed over his glazing eyeballs, mingled with the reflection of the objects he had known all his life.

The tip of a white, dry tongue came out between his teeth, and lengthening out like a slender riband, licked Jack’s paw. It was not drawn back again; Murph was dead.

Close by in the slips the fifes were shrilling, the drums beating, the audience in front clapping hands and stamping.

Jack watched beside his friend all night. At first he had crept in between his paws, as he had always done; but the chill of the cold, rigid limbs had forced him to abandon his position.

His little brain was sorely exercised, you may take my word for that. What was this icy chill, like the coldest winter’s frost, that drove him from his dear comrade’s bosom, generally so warm a refuge? He lay there by Murph’s side, dozing with one eye open; then, suddenly starting wide awake in a panic, he would touch his friend with exploring fingers to see if he was still asleep.

Finally, he lost all patience at the other’s prolonged slumbers; he shook him, he plucked at the tufts of his woolly coat, he tickled his nose—gently at first, then more roughly. But it was all no use.

Then he took Murph’s head in his little arms; it was as heavy as lead and dragged him down all sideways. But he would not let it go, holding it hard against his breast, examining it all the while with surprise and consternation. Presently, recalling what he had seen his master’s wife do, he began to rock it to and fro, cradling it softly and swaying it slowly, unceasingly from side to side, his queer little head swaying in time, like an old man’s crooning over an infant.

The dawn filtered in through the shutters of the van, and a sunbeam trembled for an instant in the dead poodle’s eyes.

XVII

Jack absolutely refused to be parted from Murph. He fell into a fury, and bit the men who tried to separate them on face and hands. He had to be dragged away and shut up in a cage. There he lived for three days, whimpering like an old man fallen into the imbecility of dotage, his haggard eyes looking out despairingly from between his wrinkled temples, his little face all shrivelled like a medlar, his lips as pale as wax, and an expression of utter life-weariness in every feature.

He would eat nothing, leaving untasted the carrots he was once so fond of, and refusing to touch either sugar or milk. All day long he cowered motionless in a corner, moaning, his eyes fixed on something invisible to others, outside the cage, far away.

XVIII

On the morning of the third day they found him stark and cold, his angular little skeleton almost piercing through the skin. His long, dry hands were closed convulsively; the lips were drawn back and showed the small, white teeth; two deep, moist furrows were visible on either side his nose, as if, before he died, the ape had been weeping for his friend.

THE CAPTIVE GOLDFINCH

The Captive Goldfinch

I

Once upon a time, far away in the depths of a great orchard, there lived a goldfinch. He was born in the spring, amid the fragrance of the fresh leaves, and there was not a prettier, sweeter little fellow to be found in any of the nests round about. His mother longed to keep him near her always, she loved him so dearly; but then, there is nothing so tempting as a pair of wings, and once July was come, the month of daring flights and dashing enterprises, light and agile as only young birds are, he left the maternal nest in search of distant adventures.

Oh! but it is enough to turn any goldfinch’s head, this flying free over the blue expanse of the skies! Hardly had he passed the limits of the orchard where he was born ere he clean forgot all about his fond mother, her warm breast, and her dark eye so full of tender solicitude.

A sort of frenzy seized him. Thinking the leaves were as eternal as the springtide, he boldly took his flight, and away across the sky; soaring ever higher and higher, he rose into the heat and glory of the sun, into the regions where the larks sing and the swallows dart, where all the wild wings make a sound as of a mighty fan opening and shutting.

Wonder of wonders! now the earth below him looked round and shining like a ball of flowers floating in an enveloping cloud of gold-dust; and bathed in splendour, he saw the sun rise and set in the glory of limitless horizons.

Oh! what glorious flights he had in the blue depths of the clouds! what games of hide-and-seek among the flickering leaves, what cries and songs and dartings after gnats, and all the delights known only to the little winged souls we call birds!

The nightingales lulled him to sleep with the melody of their concerts, the cock woke him with the shrill clarion-call of his crowing; all the day long he flitted and flew amid the endless twittering and warbling of linnets, tomtits, bullfinches, sparrows, and chaffinches, taking his part too in the orchestra, and near bursting his little throat to produce his finest notes, with that vanity that makes us one, and believe Nature has implanted in us the soul of an artist—a great, mysterious, unappreciated artist.

II

But the summer passed into autumn, and drenching rains succeeded the sunny days; the poor goldfinch had to perch of nights in rain-soaked trees, where he had to sit cold and shivering, feeling his feathers getting wet and draggled one by one. Furious winds tore away the leaves, and lo! one morning when he opened his eyes, he saw a new and strange world—the ground was covered with snow, and far as sight could reach were only white roofs, white hedges, and white trees. Winter was come!

Then oh! how bitterly he regretted his mother’s warm breast! How gladly would he have given the joys of the past summer to find himself once more pressed close to her side and feel her heart beating against his in the cosy nest! But all summer the wind had been busy confusing the pathways of the air, so that it was now impossible to discover the one that should have led him back to the nest; nay, a more blighting wind than all the rest blew out of the skies; the wind of forgetfulness had breathed upon his spirit, carrying away the memory of that happy road—the first that young folks forget. And now winter grew fierce and fell, devastating the orchards, bombarding the cottages with hailstones, driving hope from all breasts and killing the little birds in the nests—the young birds that are the hope of the verdant springtide and happy days to come.

The little goldfinch was quite sure this horror would never end, that the trees would never grow green again, that never more would the harvest clothe the fields in green, that gaiety, sunshine, and youth were vanished away for good and all.

Cowering in the hollow of an old branch, he watched the days go by like a procession of white phantoms, each uglier than the other, and his little feet all stiff with cold, his feathers frozen together with hoar-frost, sad and shivering, he thought many and many a time his last hour was come.

In vain the old birds told him of a re-birth; he could not believe in the resurrection of things when this dreary time of mourning should be over.

III

Little by little, however, the snowstorms grew rarer, stray sunbeams pierced the murkiness of the heavens, and a verdant down, at first light as a vapour, but which presently grew denser and soon took on the solidity and sheen of satin, hemmed round the sombre garment of the fields. A mildness filled the air—something restful, calm, and kindly, that was like a benediction, something the winds distilled, the sun diffused, the growing grass and humming insects and fragrant violets spread abroad, something which, like a river fed by a myriad rippling rills, gushed forth along the torrent-bed of creation.

A door seemed to open in the sooty firmament of winter, and this portal, rolling back on golden hinges, suddenly revealed the sun in his splendour, like a king stepping forth to bring peace to the peoples. Then sounded the first chord in the plain-song of the woods; waters, sky, and earth joined in the harmony with a deep, long-drawn note that rose and swelled, sobbed and sighed, grew louder and louder, assumed the majestic breadth of an orchestral symphony, and waxing gradually, ended by filling the depths and heights of air with a mighty diapason, as if all mouths, all voices, all breaths were raised together in one vast unison.

I leave you to guess if the goldfinch lifted up his voice in this universal hymn of praise!

So it was true, then! The sun had indeed returned! A fine lacework of filmy greenery began to clothe the tree boles, and the water-springs to sparkle in the shy recesses of the forest; the air was free; once more he and his comrades could laugh and sing, flit idly to and fro, pilfer and steal, plunder the orchards, peck the flowers, drink in from a drop of dew intoxication to last the livelong day, and revel in that twice-blessed existence that is full of a fine frenzy of delight to make the thrushes envious.

Good-bye to the winter covert, the crevice in the protecting bough, the moss that still keeps the impress of his little body! Nothing will satisfy him now but the wild fields of space; and with a bold sweep of wing the masterful goldfinch has left his dolorous refuge, never to return. A second piece of ingratitude, another act of forgetfulness! Yes, it must be allowed a little bird’s head has small room in it for remembrance.

IV

Good times began again. White and pink, the orchards blossomed like bridal bouquets. It snowed butterflies’ wings and flower stamens in the tall grass; lilacs hung in clusters over the walls; like a good priest saying mass, the earth donned a golden cope, and all Nature trembled and loved.

Then was the time for our pretty bird to abandon himself to endless idle wanderings and loiterings, hopping hither and thither, always on one leg, barely lighting and then off again, shaking the leaves with an incessant flutter of wings, twittering and chirping, flirting with the daisies, ruffling the hawthorn, hooting the holly. At peep of dawn he never failed, when the harebells rang their morning summons, to come down to attend the good God’s church whither the flies and sparrows assemble, still half asleep and blundering against the pillars; next the beetles get under way along the roads, teased and tormented by the butterflies and ladybirds; then the linnet leaves her bough and flies off to where the bells tinkle, but of a sudden darts back again, finding she has left something behind, lost something—more often than not her head—for the poor lady generally wears it wrong side before! Thither fly the chaffinches too, and the grave-faced oriole, the pretty bullfinch, and the chattering cock-sparrow. Then the cockchafers come, too, too often, alas! trailing after them the thread of captivity clinging to them—the burly cockchafers that, with the bumble-bee, are the bass voices of the underwoods. Plain and woodland are all alive, for there is never a creature at this fair hour of daybreak, while the skies are brightening, but is eager to come and make its orison to God in His temple.

So the little goldfinch followed their example; he preened his feathers, looking at himself admiringly in a dewdrop the while. Then, his toilet done, like all the rest of the world, he bustled off to his business and his pleasures.

V

Goldfinches’ hearts are made much the same as men’s; the spring awakes both to thoughts of love.

Our hero had remarked in his neighbourhood a sweet little hen-goldfinch. She lived with her parents in the tall branches of an apple-tree; more than once, coming home at evening, he had admired the fascinating smile of her beak at the window, embowered in foliage, where she sat watching for his going-by.

Was it his fancy? Was it really and truly a modest blush, or only the rosy reflection cast by the setting sun? Yes, sure—he had seen her redden. It needed no more to decide him to ask her hand in marriage.

One morning he made his bravest toilet, scented himself with lavender and thyme, polished up his little claws, and in this gallant array he set out, with a shining face but an anxious heart, to see the parents. They received him politely, but could not make up their minds, and begged him to come again.

He came again and again, and the more he saw of his little sweetheart, the deeper he fell in love. She was as pretty as seven in her little brown mantle with yellow facings, and her dainty head in its red hood was poised on her neck with an incomparable grace. Saucy and alert, she was as slight and slim as a flower waving in the breeze, as bright as a sunbeam piercing through the leaves, as agile as the wind. Dewdrops seemed to sparkle in the depths of her little round pupils. She was a vision of the spring-tide made into a bird!

True, our hero was no less brave to see. Gallant and gay, he cocked his beak boldly and carried the colours of his race with becoming pride.

At last the wedding-day was fixed; but the bride’s trousseau was still to seek. No doubt birds are able to start housekeeping at small cost, neither needing tables and chairs nor pots and pans; still, there must be some little fitting-out to be done.

And so thought the bride’s parents, who were prudent people, and loved their daughter.

A fine to-do there was, to be sure, on the bough where the old couple had their home; a stir that never ceased all day long kept the green hangings of the house shaking, and the doors banging; everlasting comings and goings turned the stairways upside down. Pale and eager-eyed, the little hen-goldfinch awaited the happy hour when she could fly away with her mate.

VI

Soon the news of the betrothal spread amongst the neighbours. The nearest trees were all agog; nothing was to be heard but twitterings and whisperings, not to mention backbitings, for envy is to be found everywhere in this world. The tomtits above all took a delight in saying evil of the bride, calling her a silly, insipid little thing; they chirped and chattered, whistled and whispered, pecking and pulling to pieces the poor innocent child’s good name. In vain the bullfinches, good, decent bodies, tried to interfere: the tomtits’ cackle quite drowned their grave remonstrances. The critics had enlisted a naughty grisette, a chaffinch, a minx who had kicked over the traces in her day, and was renowned for her spiteful tongue; a blackbird too had joined the conspiracy, and now, perched all together on a high branch, from which they could spy upon the comings and goings of the goldfinch household, they kept up a famous uproar.

The Master of Ceremonies of the birds’ parish arrived in the afternoon; he had come to inquire the hour at which the young folks were to be married, and if they wanted choristers to attend. It was agreed to engage a lark and a chaffinch; nightingales were too expensive. A pretty carpet of green would be laid down, as green as on the finest summer’s day; the porch was to be decorated with anemones, and the chancel with daisies; the sun would be ordered for five o’clock, to make a grand show of purple and gold. Of course the drones would be at the organ, and they would ask the wind to give them a helping hand by roaring in the pipes. The harebells would strike up a merry peal at peep of day, and ring till the bridal pair arrived. The holy-water stoup would be filled with dew. As for incense, the violets would see the censers were well filled, and the bees would keep them swinging all through the ceremony.

I forgot to tell you that a wedding breakfast had been ordered, at which, besides flies and worms galore, they were to regale themselves on a cricket and a locust—a magnificent spread indeed. The nearest spring would supply the wine; they were to have corn-berries for dessert, and the table would be laid in the thickest of an apple-tree in full blossom, where a cloud of gnats was always buzzing and making beautiful music. A yellowhammer was invited; he was a rollicking blade, and there was nobody to match him at singing a comic song.

All was going as well as could be; yet how long seemed the hours of waiting to the little bridegroom! To and fro he flitted, up and down the roads he sauntered, trying to cheat his impatience by incessant movement; presently he would light on a bough and fall a-dreaming, while his little heart beat fast and furiously.

Every minute he kept glancing up at the great dial God has set in the sky, and which only the birds can read; but the sunbeam which is the hand of this aerial clock would not move fast enough for his impatience. He could only bewail his lot, and force himself to drop asleep to kill the lagging time. He even went to see the village clockmaker, an old cuckoo, a greybeard bird with a nid-nodding head, who all day long used to strike the hours with exasperating punctuality, and besought him to quicken up the evening a bit.

But the cuckoo shook his head.

“Little madcap,” he told him, “am I to put out all the folk of the countryside for you? Don’t you know everything goes on by rule and regulation among your neighbours, and that each hour brings its own tasks? Why, whatever would they think if I rang vespers before the great timepiece of the heavens had indicated the time of twilight? What would the mole say if I brought him out of his underground house, looking black as a collier, before nightfall, and if suddenly the sun dazzled him with its light—poor purblind fellow who had never in his life dared look at anything but the moon?”

So, the cuckoo having shown him the door, he wandered off again, flitting from hedgerow to hedgerow, burning with impatience.

VII

A heap of little white grubs lay under the hedge of an orchard. More for lack of anything else to do than because he was hungry, the goldfinch flew up and fell upon it.

Ah! have a care, pretty birdie. A man was busy thereabouts just now.

But, alas, it is too late; a whole life of happiness is ruined by a moment’s curiosity. Hardly had the poor fellow plunged his beak in the mass when a string pulled the catch; down comes the trap, and he is a prisoner. Then the shape crouching behind a tree comes out from its hiding-place; it approaches, looms larger and larger, turns into a big bearded man, who opens enormous great hands, seizes the poor bird, and claps it in a cage, grinning a broad grin of satisfaction. Good-bye, little bride! Good-bye, marriage-feast and wedding-march! Good-bye, woods and orchards, gardens and flowers! Good-bye, twittering nests! Good-bye, life and love!

Consternation nailed our little hero to the spot; something had befallen him he could make nothing of; he gazed at the cage with haggard eyes, too scared to think.

Ah! if only he had lost his memory! But this consolation was denied him. He shook himself, dashed at the bars, pecked and bit at them, thinking maybe they would open and leave him free as air again.

But no; the bars would not give way.

Then he shuddered from head to foot. Anger and terror frenzied his little brain. He flew wildly at the bars; but all in vain—the cage was solid and strong.

Suddenly he realised his calamity, and, filled with a perfect frenzy of despair, with panting breath and trembling, shuddering limbs, he hurled himself at the bars, beat his head against the wires, tearing and lacerating beak and claws, flew madly up and down, breaking his wings, till, battered and bruised, his feathers all dripping with blood, exhausted and out of breath, he rolled half-dead into a corner.

It was all over!

While joy was paramount yonder in his bride’s home, while song and laughter were the order of the day, while preparations for the wedding—bitter mockery!—were completing, and all things, leaves and butterflies and nests, were a-flutter, the poor bridegroom lay in his agony amid the silence of a prison.

VIII

Evening lit up the sky with its gleaming tints of copper; little by little the chattering family groups fell silent, and the darkling trees assumed the look of long-drawn, solemn colonnades. Alas! it was not under this familiar aspect that night fell for our captive goldfinch. A dirty whitewashed wall, on which hung strangely shaped objects, replaced the sable curtain spangled with stars that twilight spreads over the countryside. A guttering, flaring candle smoked on the table, bearing how faint a resemblance to the silver moon! and by its sordid light the hard-hearted wretch who had robbed him of his liberty was moving to and fro.

Ah! what right had he, this miserable birdcatcher, this highway robber, to tear him from the free air, the hedgerows and the green fields? Tiny though he be, is the bird therefore of no import to the leaves, the winds, the trees, which without him would be voiceless? Has the blue sky no need of his outspread wings, his echoing song, the flutter of his plumage?

What use the pool glittering in the woodland, if he was not there to dip his beak in it and absorb in a drop of water the red of dawn, the gold of noon, the deep shadow of the quivering leaves? Is not a little bird the less a disaster in the forests and orchard-closes, a voice silenced in the symphony of nature, a furrow left barren in the fields of space, a bright point vanished from the azure sky? Is not the universe disturbed for the loss of a little creature wherein all nature is summed up and glorified?

The man blew out the taper, and a moonbeam shot in at the garret-window and fell on the poor captive.

It formed, as it were, a luminous rail on which his thoughts glided; and they always travelled in one direction—to his little fiancée, who at that moment, softly cradled by the night wind, was fast asleep and dreaming of the great to-morrow.

The moon paled and daylight appeared.

Yonder no doubt all was ready; the harebells were ringing their peal, the drones were organing their deep music, while the trembling bride, white as the lilies, was asking herself why her bridegroom did not come.

The cuckoo clanged out the hour of dawn. One and all were ready for the fête; only his arrival was waited for.

The hours slipped by without his appearing, and little by little the murmuring and muttering, low at first, grew louder and louder, and rose into a perfect tempest of cries and jeers and gibes. The chaffinches were jubilant, the parents disconsolate. And what of her, the poor, despairing bride? Her pretty innocent eyes could not bear the light of day; stricken to the heart by this unaccountable desertion, she was borne away fainting, half dead with shame and sorrow.

IX

Dark days followed. At first only a prisoner, his cruel master now made him into a galley-slave. He put a chain round his foot, and condemned him to the servitude of the car and cord. So drag your weight, work your pulley, haul in your little car, poor outcast! Who has not seen the monstrous spectacle—one of God’s creatures, created to fly free in the realms of air, coming and going on a toy platform, a ring about its leg? Who has not seen the unhappy captive, to win meat and drink, drawing up by little laborious jerks the water-jar and car, its eye gleaming with pitiful longing, gaining its subsistence by a never-ending useless martyrdom? Only he who has seen the cruel sight knows to what lengths the cruelty of bad men can go.

This was the fate of the poor goldfinch.

The man had given him a cage to imitate a Swiss châlet, in front of which was a little terrace. On the terrace was fixed a post, with a pulley attached worked by a thread. This thread the captive had to pull in with his beak, little by little, till the little drinking-bucket hooked to the other end rose to the level of the platform; then putting his foot on the cord, he had to hold it in place and so drink a drop, bitter as a tear, hurriedly and fearfully, lest the thread should slip from under his claw and suddenly let the bucket run down again.

More often than not the bucket upset in its descent, and then he had to go without water for the rest of the day.

A second thread made it possible for him to haul to the edge of the platform a miniature car running on an inclined plane outside the cage; this held his bird-seed. What a struggle it was to drag it up! At each snap of the beak the car would ascend, but oh! so slowly. By successive jerks, never tiring, never stopping, with straining neck, working with the adroitness of a galley-slave, and clapping his foot on the cord after each pull, he had to drag up the accursed car, which would sometimes elude him and dash down the incline again, spilling the seed and mocking all his laborious efforts!

A hundred times a day he was forced to begin the horrid task again.

Many a time the goldfinch resolved to give in and die of hunger; but hunger is a terrible thing, and no sooner did its pangs begin to pinch his little stomach than he would seize the cord afresh and pull for dear life.

X

So passed the hours for the once happy bridegroom. Never a chirp now, never a flirt of the tail! Disconsolate and draggled, every feather of his little body betraying the misery of his broken life, he seemed an embodiment of the bitter protest of the winged creation against the cruelty of man.

A feeble ray of sunshine used to flicker on the garret walls towards midday; he would watch for it, and when it came at last, shooting a slender pencil of gold, in which the dust-motes danced athwart the gloom of his prison-house, it was like a brief instant of recovered freedom; for a moment he forgot his chain, his car, his slavery, and away he flew in fancy to the great orchards that showed their black masses of shadow on the horizon. Alas! the sunbeam slid along the wall and disappeared, and the appalling reality came home to him again.

What had he done to deserve this cruel fate? To filch a grain of corn here and there, to forage in the kitchen-gardens, to play the truant, to make the most of life, all day long to fly hither and thither, the free denizen of air—was this a crime? He never reflected how he had forgotten his mother, and that this crime alone deserved the sternest expiation.

His master was one of those good-for-nothing workmen who make the whole week a series of Sundays. One night he forgot to come home at all; next morning the ill-starred captive found bucket and car both empty. No use hauling them up to him and pecking about in every corner; never a grain of seed was to be found, never a drop of water! Then indeed he knew the torments of hunger and thirst. In vain he toiled at his cruel, slavish task; the car ascended, the bucket rose, but without bringing solace to his famished cravings. His tools refused their office; with pale eyes of consternation the poor prisoner gazed at them, and could not understand.

As if by the irony of fate, the window had been left wide open, and he could plainly see the green of the nearest trees, in which the birds, his more fortunate brethren, were squabbling. He saw the sun slowly sink and the shadows of the house-roofs lengthen. Then a frenzy of madness seized him; with quick, frantic pecks he tore at the chain riveted round his leg, and by sheer fury burst its rings.

To dart to the window, to sail away for the paling blue of the sky, was the work of an instant; but next minute he fell to earth again, so weak was he with hunger. Luckily, not far from the foot of the tree where he had dropped, a flock of pigeons was enjoying a feast of oats at the door of a stable. He joined the band, and in a very short while had plumped his crop to such good purpose that he felt his full strength come back to him.

A long time had passed since he had quitted his bonny bride, and he trembled to think what changes the days might have brought with them in her life. Still the longing to see her again grew so irresistible after he had been free an hour that, even if she had forgotten him, he was fain to bid her farewell.

And pr-r-r-rt! he was off like the wind.

All the world was asleep when he arrived—even the tomtits, those inveterate gossips, who love to loiter at their doors long after dark, talking scandal of their neighbours.

“Little bride! little bride!” he breathed softly.

A yellowhammer answered him in a cross voice—

“Third tree to the left in the next orchard!”

Why, actually the goldfinches had removed! He hurried to the tree indicated, and once again, “Little bride!” he whispered.

A faint cry answered, and next moment his sweetheart appeared.

“I was waiting for you,” she cried.

Ah! these were happy moments that made up for all their sufferings. He told her all his adventures; she told him how her faith in him had never faltered. They woke the parents, who warmly welcomed the returned prodigal.

“Just think,” said the mother, “those odious chaffinches positively forced us to leave the neighbourhood. Life was become unbearable; morning, noon, and night it was nothing but insulting remarks. But now you are come back again! So these spiteful folks will be finely confounded.”

Another old hen-goldfinch was there, who was gazing at him with wet eyes and wings all a-tremble.

“Ah!” cried our hero, “why, it is mamma, my poor mother I had forgotten so long!”

Yes, it was his mother indeed: his little bride, after his disappearance, had never wearied till she found her, telling herself that, with her for company, there would be two of them to wait for his return.

Their happiness was complete.

Two days after, but soberly this time, without drum or trumpet, the wedding was solemnised.

The story has its moral, as every story should. It was the goldfinch’s father-in-law who undertook to draw it for his young friend’s benefit.

“Son-in-law,” he said, “I hope you will teach your little ones two lessons. The first is—never forget your mother; the second—beware of traps in the hedgerows.”

STRANGE ADVENTURES OF A LITTLE WHITE RABBIT

Strange Adventures of a Little White Rabbit

Four little rabbits had seen the light in a hutch snugly stuffed with straw, where they lived cosy and warm by their mother’s side.

They were pretty, plump little things, all four as fat as butter, and just as well-liking one as the other; but while three of them had white bellies and dappled backs, one was white all over from head to foot, and his mother was mighty proud of his beauty, you may be sure.

You could not have found so exquisite a rabbit, no, not for three leagues round, and every day he grew handsomer and handsomer, like a king’s son. Two great rubies glittered in his fine eyes, and his teeth were just like the edge of a saw; yes, and he had a moustache—three hairs, which made him, oh! so conceited.

Mother Rabbit loved them all tenderly; but she loved Jannot, her firstborn, best of all.

To begin with, he was the eldest; then she had had more trouble to rear him, and ill-health always draws a closer bond between mother and child; besides, she was inordinately proud of his white coat, and dreamt he was destined for greatness. What form would it take? This she could not tell. Perhaps he would take first prize at a show—perhaps he would found a breed of white rabbits like himself. She lavished every delicacy upon her darling, and his prospective honours consoled her for the triviality of everyday existence.

They would soon be two months old, and that is the age when young bunnies are taken from their mothers. She dreaded the moment of parting; Jannot would have to go with the rest.

In fact, all four were weaned by this time; they were beginning to gnaw at carrots now, and would often try to get out through any gaps they could find, for they longed to see the great world. The hutch had open bars, and they could look out into a kitchen-garden with lettuce-beds, and beyond that see a flock of ducks paddling about beside a brook. There was an apple-tree to the right, with a cloud of sparrows always squabbling round it. To the left an outhouse door gave a glimpse of cows and horses, dimly outlined in the gloom of the interior. There were cats, too, stretching themselves in the sun or stalking sedately up and down.

At peep of day the whole farmyard woke up; noon brought a momentary silence; then, as the sun grew hotter, sparrows chirped, ducks quacked, cows lowed, and the din went on uninterruptedly till dusk.

The little bunnies would fain have joined the other animals; they would gaze wistfully at the birds flying high in the air, and the sight of the cattle marching off cheerfully for the pastures gave them a craving for the green fields.

How big the farmyard seemed, to be sure! and how amazed they were when Mother Rabbit told them there were other places bigger still which they could not see. She described the woods and ravines and burrows, for she knew these well enough from hearsay; why, they could not have travelled round the world in a whole day, so enormous it was! Squatted round their mother, the youngsters listened to all this, and their hearts almost failed them.

But not so Jannot; his imagination was stimulated by what he heard.

“Ah!” he would cry, “will they never let me out, that I may have my chance of seeing all these wonderful things?”

Then his mother was alarmed; but he would kiss her and promise he would come back again directly, once he had seen the world. But she only shook her head, and could not make up her mind to let him go.

“The world is full of cruel beasts; you will never, never escape its dangers.”

“I have teeth and claws.”

“So have they, child; but their teeth are longer and their claws sharper than yours. Restrain your eagerness; time enough yet to go forth into the wide, wide world.”

He would shake his head impatiently and fall to gnawing at the woodwork of the hutch; in fact his mind was full of guilty thoughts of escape. At last, one fine morning, when his mother was tidying the litter, he made a bolt for it.

Scarcely had he gone a hundred steps when he was arrested by a startling sight. He beheld half-a-dozen hairy brown skins nailed up in a row. They still retained the shape of the bodies they had once clothed, and little trickles of blood ran down the wall where they hung. There was no mistaking; they had belonged to rabbits like himself.

“Oh, dear!” he thought, “so they kill rabbits, do they?”

But this sinister sight was quickly forgotten in the variety of new wonders he encountered. A pig was grunting on a dunghill, with a young foal kicking at him and destroying his peace of mind, and a goat gambolling near by; one after the other he saw a rat, a dog, a calf, and a flock of pigeons that suddenly took wing.

They rose in the warm morning air, glittering in the sun, flying so high he soon lost sight of them altogether. Looking down again, he noticed a cat watching him, and remembered he had seen her in the garden, prowling among the lettuces.

The width of the yard was between them, and he had a barn behind him. The cat lay crouched on the kitchen steps; she never moved, but her eyes were wide open and glittered cruelly. Then she got up slowly.

Jannot believed his last hour was come; he thought of his mother, and shut his eyes. A furious barking made him open them again. The cat was gone; with one bound Jannot sprang into a cart round which a bull-dog was racing with his mouth wide open, and leapt from there into the barn.

Inside the straw was piled up mountains high, so close to the wall he had some difficulty in forcing a passage; still, it was only betwixt the wall and the straw he could hope to find a safe refuge. He durst not come out again, and stayed there in hiding till nightfall.

Then he plucked up spirit, took a step or two in the dark, and came upon a hole close down to the floor through which he could slip.

What a sight met him outside! The country lay white in the moonlight, house-roofs, pools, watercourses glittering in the beams. The leaves quivered restlessly in the night wind, and the distant clumps of brushwood stood out in clear-cut outline. It was very beautiful; but look! suddenly, close to him, two long, black, moving shadows scared him out of his seven senses.

The cat!

Jannot never stopped till he reached the woods, after darting across the garden, leaping a brook, scurrying over the fields, breathless and exhausted. Vague shadows loomed around him; flying footsteps sounded about his path; suddenly, by the startled cry that escaped a little creature which halted right before his nose, he knew he was in presence of another rabbit.

“I am Jannot,” he said, in a low voice; “perhaps we are relations.”

From the first moment the rabbit saw him, he loaded him with polite attentions, declared he loved him already, and offered him the hospitality of his house; so the two of them jogged off in company. But after a moment or two Goodman Rabbit stopped dead, saying—

“You’d best go by the clearing, and I through the scrub; it will never do to let the polecat see us. We will meet at the foot of a great oak you can’t help seeing.”

Jannot followed his companion’s advice; but no sooner were they together again than the rabbit, after fifty yards or so, cried out once more—

“The place we’re in now is just as dangerous as the other. A wild-cat lurks hereabouts, and slaughters whatever comes under his claws. You go that way; I’ll go this. A rock you will see will serve as rendezvous.”

They reached the rock at the same moment, and then trotted off again. They were just coming to a coppice of young trees with narrow winding paths through it when his experienced friend called a halt for the third time, crying—

“Well, we did well not to travel side by side. My advice is that we go each his own way again, without bothering about one another, till we come to the crossroads you’ll find down yonder. Ah! d’ye see those snares? Mind you don’t get into them, for if the polecat and the wild-cat are lords of the lands we have just been through, the poacher rules here as monarch paramount.”

The advice was good, but its giver had no time to finish it; he was caught by the foot in one of the gins, and the more he struggled to get free, the tighter the dreadful noose was drawn.

“Help! help!” he clamoured.

But already Jannot was off and away, panic-stricken; he ran on and on, never once stopping till he won back as quick as ever he could to the edge of the woodland where he and Master Rabbit had first met.

“If the world is so strewn with dangers,” he thought to himself, “better to live in peace and quietness in a hutch. What use in roaming the woods, when death is at the journey’s end?”

Then in his mind’s eye he saw his mother again and his brothers; and the safe shelter where they awaited his return seemed a far-off, happy refuge he could hardly hope to reach.

Field-mice and weasels and martens were stirring in the dark underwood and shaking the leaves. Suddenly a new terror, more appalling than all the rest, gripped him; he thought he was being pursued. Then he dashed out into the plain that lay clear in the moonlight, and, with ears pricked, thinking all the while he could hear at his heels the unwearying, unflagging trot, trot of the fell creatures that were on his track, he pushed through hedges, leapt ditches, climbed banks.

He had his back to the moon, and two black shadows, the same he had seen at the outset of his escapade, stretched out before him; this time they went in front, never leaving him, and sometimes lengthening out to portentous proportions.

No doubt about it, a whole host of enemies was after him!

At last his breath failed him and he sank down in despair, waiting for death; but as it was a long time coming, he began to recover a little courage, and, turning round, stared hard into the night.

Not a thing was visible amid the loneliness of the fields, and the moon seemed to be grinning down at him from the sky.

Then he discovered that the two shadows that had terrified him so were only the shadows of his own two ears. This was mortifying!

Day dawned by slow degrees; and presently he found himself back by the brook, the ducks, the cow-shed and the kitchen-garden.

“Mind this,” his mother told him, “there’s no adventures so fine as to match the pleasure of being safe at home, among the folks who love you.”

“Monsieur Friquet”

Nature had not been generous to the poor thing; Claire was born a hunchback, and a hunchback she had grown up—if indeed she can be said ever to have grown up—an undersized, sickly, suffering creature, who at thirty was not as high, from head to heels, as a little girl of nine.

She had been left an orphan when quite a child; first her mother died, and her father had not survived her long. So Claire had had to face the world alone, with her own ten fingers for all her fortune. Her parents had never spoilt her with overmuch indulgence. They were poor, hardworking folks, who hardly knew what it was to smile. Even when they were alive, she had led a lonely enough existence. Still, after their death, she missed the life lived in common, the destitution shared with others, the bustle of the hugger-mugger household, where scolding and grumbling were by no means unknown. Her parents were her parents after all; with them life had its happy moments, now and then.

“MONSIEUR FRIQUET”

They were hard times now for Claire. Shut up all day long in the unhealthy air of workrooms, she seemed to grow more and more emaciated, and smaller and smaller every day. Nobody ever thought of pitying the poor, uncouth being who sat sewing apart from the rest, who, with a gentle humility, always sought the shade, where her deformity was less noticeable; nobody ever dreamed of asking if there was a soul within that misshapen body, and her great eyes—light blue, sickly-looking eyes, which she would raise slowly and languidly, as if afraid of the light—encountered only mockery and indifference from all about her.

The tall, handsome girls who sat round the sewing-table had nothing but hard words for her; scarcely knowing why, yielding to a cruel impulse which a little thought, if nothing better, would have checked, they treated her vilely.

Little by little she had become the general butt of the workroom; one dismal day in December a last outrage was added to all the rest.

An ill-conditioned cripple, a girl who had borne Claire a grudge from the first day of her coming, because of their sisterhood in misfortune, which caused twice as many gibes to be levelled at her own club-foot, contrived to secrete a piece of silk, in order to accuse Claire of the theft. She declared stoutly she had taken the piece and hidden it inside her dress. In vain the poor girl, bursting into tears, swore she was innocent. The head of the shop ordered her to strip. She begged piteously for mercy, clasping her hands in supplication; but the cripple moved heaven and earth to set the others against her. Rough hands were laid on her; she was bruised and shaken and hurt; all she could do was to stammer out appeals to their compassion; she was nearly fainting, and the tears were streaming down her cheeks. No use; the poor back was bared, and while the mistress was searching her, the pretty, rosy-cheeked workgirls were feeling the deformity curiously, examining what like a hump exactly was.

Claire had buried her face in her hands; her hair had fallen about her ears, and there she stood, quite still and helpless, terrified at the angry faces about her; her throat was dry and her whole body quivering with overmastering agitation. She wished she was dead.

The mistress’s hard voice dismissing her roused her at last; she got to her feet amidst the jeers of the workroom, buttoned her frock, collected her needles and scissors, and, shuddering and shaking, catching her feet in her skirts, she hurried to the door; there was a loud buzzing in her ears, and she seemed to see everything through a sort of mist.

She dashed downstairs two steps at a time and reached the riverside quays, looking in her despair for an unfrequented bridge from which an unhappy hunchback might throw herself into the water and not be noticed. But everywhere she seemed to see mocking eyes pursuing her.

By degrees she began to think of the dreadful publicity of such a death; she saw herself dragged from the river, laid on the crowded bank, under the eyes of a throng of curious onlookers, in the glaring light of day.

No, what she craved was a quiet death in some dark corner, where she would be sheltered from prying looks.

She retraced her steps, bought a supply of charcoal, which she hid in a fold of her gown, and made her way home. Her poor worn hands had helped her—how hardly!—to live, now they should help her to die.

Possessed by these ideas, she pushed open the door of the room—and suddenly stopped....

How, when, by what way had he got in, the little sparrow she saw beating his wings against the walls, looking so scared and frightened, trying in vain to find a way out of the garret he had invaded so impudently, like the little good-for-nothing scamp he was?

Yes, she remembered; that morning, before leaving, she had left the window ajar; but no doubt the wind had blown it to, and after coming in unhindered, like a conquering hero taking possession of a new kingdom, the bird was now a prisoner.

A prisoner? But why a prisoner? What had she and he in common? He only asked to live, to fly, to soar in the free air, while she, she was fain to die. Begone, little madcap! you shall have your freedom again.

She went to the window; but as her hand touched the latch, she paused. The sparrow had stopped fluttering about the room; cowering in the corner of a cupboard, his little breast heaving with terror and breathlessness, he was looking at her with his frightened eyes.

To see him shivering and shaking and ruffling his feathers in terror, she seemed to recognise a fellow-sufferer. Her life, from first to last, had it not been one long quaking agony of fear, exposed to never-ending uncertainties and disappointments? The similarity made a sort of common bond between them, and her heart stirred with a longing for a last touch of love and sympathy with the living creatures of this earth she was about to quit.

She left the window, advanced a step, and held out her finger to beckon and encourage him. But the movement, gentle as it was, was misunderstood by the bird; he spread his wings and darted up to the ceiling. Then she spoke to him, and very humbly—she found it very easy to be humble—besought him—

“Poor birdie, why should you be afraid of me? Do you think I want to hurt you? I only ask you one favour—to kiss you once, just once, before.... There, come, light there on my hand; let me just hold you; you shall fly away again directly after. Come, dear birdie, I know I am ugly to look at, but I am not cruel.”

And stepping softly, silently, she followed him about the room, with outstretched fingers and smiling lips, almost like a mother, as if she were talking to a little child. Then, as he would not come—

“Come, now.... Does my back shock you—like the others? Why should you care if I am hunchbacked, when you are so pretty? Come, pretty birdie—if only to give me the strength I need so badly.”

She crumbled some bread on the table. This made the bird hesitate; he did not come down at once, but, still perching aloft, gazed down at the white crumbs, craning his neck, his eyes glittering with greediness.

Finally appetite overcame prudence. He darted down on to the table and began to peck—tock, tock! at the food, stopping every now and then to shake out his feathers and cocking up his head to look about him.