TALES OF THE BIRDS

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

TALES OF THE BIRDS

BY
W. WARDE FOWLER
AUTHOR OF “A YEAR WITH THE BIRDS.”

“Μετἀ δἐ χρόνον την πελειάδα ἀνθρωηίη
φωνή αὐδάξασθαι λέγουσι.”
Herodotus

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY BRYAN HOOK
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1909
Richard Clay and Sons, Limited.
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
First Edition., 1888.
Second Edition, 1889. Reprinted, 1891, 1899, 1909.
School Edition, 1901. Reprinted, 1903 (twice).
TO
G. J. E.
IN MEMORY OF PLEASANT DAYS
IN THE SUNNY SUMMER
OF 1887.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

TALES OF THE BIRDS.

A WINTER’S TALE.

There is a certain quiet bit of land, just where two midland counties meet, that is in winter a favourite resort of the fieldfares. There they find all they need—the hedges are usually bright with hips, and with the darker crimson berries of the hawthorn; the fields are all pasture-meadows, and the grass is tufty and full of insects; a little stream winds snake-like through the fields, hidden by an overarching growth of briar and bramble. No well-worn path crosses these meadows, and you may count on being undisturbed if you sit for a few minutes, to enjoy the winter sunshine and watch the shy birds, on the bole of one of the scattered elms that shelter the cows in summer. The fieldfares are in clover here: they get food, drink, sunshine when there is any, and above all the solitude they so deeply love. In other parts of the district you may see them, or you may not, for they move about and show their handsome forms and slaty backs, now here, now there; but in this favoured haunt some are always to be seen, and set up their loud call-note from elm or hedgetop as soon as your intruding form is seen moving in their direction.

One autumn there had been but a poor crop of berries; and by the time the fieldfares arrived in middle England the blackbirds and missel-thrushes had already rifled the hedges of much of their fruit. But up to the middle of January enough remained to feed the usual number of visitors, and when once January is past, they may hope for open weather and a plentiful supply of grubs and worms to help them out. During the third week in that wintry month, the sun shone bright and warm, though the fields were covered with hoar frost at night; no thought of trouble entered the hearts of the birds; in the middle of the day you might even have heard them uttering a faint kind of song from the hedge-top over the brook, as the genial sun warmed them and bade them think of the spring that was surely coming.

But the frost went on, day by day; and now the blue sky was covered with dull cloud, driven before a bitter north-east wind, so that the sun could no longer melt the hard-bound meadows with his midday glow. The fieldfares found themselves quite alone. The redwings had gone to the neighbourhood of the towns and villages, and so too had the robins and wrens, who had lived in the hedges all the winter through till now. The rooks and starlings were in the ploughed fields, and searching even there almost in vain for food. A chance crow or magpie was all the company they had for several days together; and crows and magpies are not always agreeable neighbours.

At last the berries were all gone, and the ground so hard-frozen that no bill could break it and no bird hope to find grub or worm there. Some of the elder birds went a long distance one day to forage; they returned very tired with news of a single hedge on which there was still some store of berries, but they had left one of their number behind them. The old birds looked very grave; they called a meeting, and then the eldest, with drooping tail and lack-lustre eye, told them that they must stay no longer where they were, and no longer keep all together. They must break up into small parties and find their food as best they could for themselves; if they did not go far, and the frost broke up, they might all find their way back again in a few days; all might yet be well. “But I must tell you,” said he, turning to the younger birds, “that if the frost goes on, or if snow falls, we shall all be in peril of our lives. And see, a light, dry snow is falling already! You that are young and strong must leave us at once and go southward. Do not delay a moment; fly while you can. We, who are already tired out, will seek the berry hedge we found, and try and recruit ourselves before we move further. We left our poor old friend under that hedge this morning, with his head under his wing, and we do not know whether we shall find him again alive. But we will all hope for the best, and try to struggle through a bad time. Good-bye, young ones, good-bye! Be sure you break up into companies of three or four, or you will never find enough to keep you from starving. Keep a good heart, and go straight southwards towards the mid-day sun, and when the frost goes, come again northwards, and hope to find us here.” Then he flew away, slowly and feebly, and most of the other old birds followed him.

The young ones, who still had plenty of life and hope in them, and hardly knew what it was to be in peril of their lives, soon broke up into different divisions, and started different ways, but all in a southward direction. Each company had its leader, and there was much rivalry as to which should belong to the company which was led by a handsome and lively bird named Cocktail, to whom they all looked up. But Cocktail would not have more than three with him; and Cocktail was wont to have his own way. He chose his great friend Feltie[1] and two others, Jack and Jill; and off they went with a loud and hearty good-bye; the other three quite confident in Cocktail’s prudence, skill, and courage. He was nearly two years old; he had had a nest and family last summer in a Norwegian pine-forest; he had attacked a magpie that was threatening his young, and beaten it away in disgrace; he had led a large party across the Northern Sea last autumn to England, and had found them all a breakfast within an hour of landing. Whatever he did was sure to be right, and wherever he went there was sure to be food. He was well aware of all his virtues, and liked, in a cheerful and pleasant way, to be made much of; and he had taken young Feltie under his protection from their first acquaintance, because Feltie had very soon made it plain that in his honest eyes there was no such bird as Cocktail to be found in the whole world. Jill was chosen because she was a young hen-bird of a mild and yielding disposition, yet of pleasant manners and ladylike ways; and to say the truth, during these sunny days of late, Cocktail had cast an approving eye upon her, and had half made up his mind to select her as his partner for the coming spring and summer—provided of course that no one with superior charms should meet his eye in the meantime. As for her own choice in the matter, that never entered into his calculations. Lastly, Jack was the brother of Jill, and very fond of her—which is not usually the case with brothers and sisters among the fieldfares; and on this account he was allowed to join the party. “We must have one more,” Cocktail had said before they started, “and it really doesn’t much matter who it is provided he will follow me and do what I tell him. No swaggerers here, please; I want some one who’s nobody in particular!”

“Oh, if you wouldn’t mind, Cocktail,” said Jill humbly, “I don’t think Jack is any one in particular, mayn’t he come?”

“Let him come forward,” said Cocktail magnificently; “let me see him. Here, you Jack, are you any one in particular?” Jack declared that he was no one but himself, and therefore could not be any one in particular, like Cocktail; and on the strength of this he was admitted to the little company.

Cocktail now found the fondest desire of his heart realized; so far his genius had always been hampered by older birds, who in spite of their inferior talents would always contrive to direct the movements of a troop by combining together: but now he was in sole and happy command of three admiring subjects, who would not worry him with advice, and would obey his orders implicitly. He took them first to the top of a tall elm, whence they could see over the fast whitening fields to a range of hills not far away to the southward; he told them that he should cross those hills and rest for the night on the other side in shelter which he would find for them. Meanwhile they were to fly at a little distance apart, in order to keep a good look-out for berries; but they must always keep their eyes on him, and when they heard his signal “Chak-chak,” they were to join him again at once.

“The first who fails to come at that signal,” said Cocktail, “or who is guilty of any negligence or disobedience, WILL BE AT ONCE LEFT BEHIND!”

With these words he started off, and the others followed him as they had been told, at a little distance to right and left. Very little in the way of food was found that day, and Jack and Jill were getting tired and hungry, when after rising to the hills, and passing for some miles over high, desolate country, where there was hardly a hedge to be seen, and the white carpet was only broken by low gray stone walls which could not help a hungry fieldfare, they descended towards evening into the shelter of a little well-wooded valley,[2] where were the pleasant grounds of a gentleman’s house. Cocktail made straight for this house, but stopped short on a tall tree outside the garden, and began to look round him.

It was about four o’clock, and fast getting dark. He could see the lamp lighted in a room in the house, and a bright fire burning; a lady sat by the fire at work; then a maid came in with tea, and the blinds were drawn down, the shutters closed, and all was gray and cold again. But Cocktail’s keen eye had seen something by the bright firelight which made him jerk his tail and sit more upright on his bough—berries, scarlet berries, arranged all about an old oak chimney-piece!

“Shame!” said he indignantly; “but there must be more of them in the garden.” And bidding the others follow, he flew down into the well-planted grounds. They here found themselves nearer to human habitations than they had ever been in their lives before; but hunger made them bold. “To right and left,” said Cocktail, “and look for holly-bushes.” His own search was a failure; he found several bushes, but not a berry was left. He felt very angry when he thought of the rich store of berries inside that cosy room, where no starving birds could get at them. There was the well-fed lady enjoying her tea by the fire, and looking with admiration at the berries (looking indeed, thought Cocktail, and not eating them!), and here were four poor birds starving outside in the cold for want of them.

But now a “chak” was heard from another part of the garden. Making his way there, he found that Jack was the lucky discoverer of a bush that still boasted a fair store of berries; up came the others too, and now they had a good feast on the berries as long as the light lasted: then, at Cocktail’s order, they dropped down to roost in a thick shrubbery some distance from the house, where the evergreens had as yet kept the snow from lying very deep upon the ground. In a few minutes their four heads were under their tired wings, and they were fast asleep.

Next day they were awake early, but their breakfast on the remaining berries was rudely interrupted by the gardener, who came to sweep the snow from the walks; and after lingering in a tree for a few minutes, Cocktail gave an angry “chak,” and led the way again southwards. To have his breakfast broken into in this way was more than he was used to, and for several days he had had no morning bath. And more than that, he was tired and stiff with the night’s hard frost; so his temper was not so good as usual, and he flew high and quick, hardly looking at the hedges as he passed over them. Many a time the others would fain have stopped to pick a stray berry, or try for grains on a stubble-field where they could see partridges cowering below them; but on went Cocktail without heeding, and on they had to go too.

About midday they came to the foot of another long range of hills, which they had seen in the distance for some time. The north-east wind was blowing hard, and had driven them some way to the westwards; and they had turned still farther west to avoid a large town,[3] where engines were puffing, and trains rushing continually in and out. Under these hills they found a large park, with thorn-bushes planted here and there, on which a few berries were still showing red through the white rime that clung to them; and here Cocktail at last halted, and allowed his famished followers a little rest. But he was more severe and imperious than on the day before, and strictly forbade them to go out of his sight.

“We shall go on again before long,” he said; “we must get further south yet, so be ready to start at any moment.”

“Don’t you think,” said Jack, “that we might stay here a day or two at least? The park is large, and there are a few berries on a good many of the trees.”

“Did I ask your advice?” said Cocktail angrily.

“No, you didn’t, but—”

“Then hold your tongue, Mr. Nobody-in-particular. I did not bring you here to tell me what I ought to do. Leave this bush directly. Do as I tell you at once—it’s all you’re fit for.” So Jack retired in disgrace, and in great wrath, and Jill went with him. Poor little Jill! She was getting very faint, and had hardly had strength left to get as far as she had come; but being a brave little soul she kept it to herself and struggled on. But when she was alone with Jack she told him how bad she felt.

“Jack,” she said, “I can fly no further to-day. Why does he want to go on?”

“Because he knows more about it than we do, I suppose,” said Jack. “And we have promised to follow, you know. You must have a good dinner and come on somehow.”

“But I can’t eat,” said Jill: “I’m so tired, I can hardly move, and the berries are so hard and dry, I can’t get them down my throat.”

“That’s serious,” returned Jack; “you must certainly have rest. I’ll go and tell Cocktail, and he’ll be sure to stay a day or two.”

So Jack flew back to Cocktail’s bush, but was instantly ordered off again. Feltie however flew after him to ask what he wanted, and on hearing the state of things, undertook to be his ambassador to Cocktail. But that imperious captain would not listen.

“Rubbish,” he said. “Do you suppose I didn’t know that we should have this kind of thing going on? What’s the good of a leader if he is not to whip up lazy birds?” And he instantly gave the signal for starting, and flew off towards the hills. Feltie followed him by instinct, and turning to look back, saw Jack and Jill starting too, the latter flying slowly and feebly. Feltie’s heart sank within him; he couldn’t help thinking that it was cruel of Cocktail, and that there was no real reason why they should not stay. He looked at the line of hills; they were one long range of pure white, not even broken by the dark line of a wall or a hedge. As the ground rose below them the cold wind blew still colder. How much more comfortable it had been in the park! He would make a last effort to save Jill’s strength, and perhaps her life. If they could only halt on that large clump of trees at the top of the great curving hill they were now flying up, all might be well; Cocktail might be persuaded to turn back again.

He put on his utmost speed, and overtook his leader.

“Cocktail,” he said, “dear captain, will you perch for a moment on these trees to let the others come up?”

Cocktail was really fond of Feltie, whereas he only patronized Jill and tolerated Jack. He also felt that he had been harsh, and was willing to be gracious once more. He agreed to halt, and when they reached the trees he turned round to the wind and gave his loudest “Chak-chak.” But there were no birds in sight.

They waited a moment, Feltie’s heart fluttering; Cocktail sitting strongly on his bough, with head erect. Then he called again, and then again. After that there was a long silence. Feltie dared not break it; Cocktail was too proud to do so. Not a living creature was in sight; not a labourer returning to his fireside; not a rook, not a rabbit. There were tracks of four-footed creatures on the snow below the clump of trees, but all was deadly still, except the branches as they swayed in the bitter wind.

Suddenly the shriek of an engine coming from the distant town broke in on the silence, and gave Feltie a kind of courage.

“Let us go back,” he said, “and find them. Jill can’t go on, I feel sure, and Jack has stayed with her. Let us go back and pass the night in the park.”

“Feltie,” said Cocktail, “I never guessed you were such a coward. You want to stay behind too, do you? Go back and join Jack and Jill; the berries won’t last so long as the frost, and you will be less able then to fly further south. There you’ll stay, and there perhaps you’ll die; and I shall never see you again. Why can’t you trust in me? I expected to be obeyed, and you are all rebelling and deserting me!”

Feltie made up his mind in a moment. Jack and Jill must take care of themselves; he and Cocktail must hold together. A shade of pity crossed his mind for Cocktail’s disappointment. “He was meant to lead,” he thought, “and we are not giving him a fair chance. Whatever happens I will stick to him, and perhaps he will need my help yet.”

“I am ready,” he said; “I will not leave you.”

“That’s a good fellow,” said Cocktail. “Now fly your best; the sun must be sinking soon, for though it is all cloudy, I can see a faint pink light on the hills we left behind us this morning. Remember how easily we got across them, and what a good supper we found on the other side. We shall soon be across these hills too, and then we will find another garden and more holly-trees.” And off he flew.

Cocktail was quite himself again, but he had reckoned without his host: how was he, poor bird, to know what the Marlborough Downs were like in winter? How was he to guess that instead of reaching some deep warm valley at sunset, they might fly on till after dark, and indeed perhaps all through the night, without a chance of escaping from that terrible wind? Long, undulating plains, all shrouded in white; rounded hills, whose dim whiteness melted into leaden gray as it met the snow-laden clouds; here and there a shelterless dip, down which the wind swept almost more wildly than on the open plain: between these they had to choose, if choose they would: and as one was no better than the other, they went straight on.

At last they reached a rather deeper and wider hollow, at the bottom of which a large road ran.[4] A high bank sheltered this road to the north, and at the top of the bank was a hedge. It was now dark, blowing and snowing furiously.

“This is our only chance, Feltie,” said Cocktail: “but see there where the road turns a little; there we can get a better shelter.”

And here, just where an old ruined turnpike cottage stood between the road and the bank, with long brown grass growing behind it, they settled down for the night—a night which few who live on those downs will ever forget. Feltie himself used afterwards to say that they must have died, but for one solitary piece of good fortune. The two birds had crouched down in the long grass at the foot of the bank close to each other, and put their heads under their wings, but sleep would not come; they were too hungry and too wretched. Some time after dark a rustling was heard in the frozen grass; some four-footed creature was coming.

“Fox!” whispered Cocktail; “but I can’t fly, and if I could, where should we go? It’s all up, I fear, but crouch closer in the grass and see.”

It was not a fox; it was a hare. Puss came softly in behind the ruined cottage, and crouched down quietly close to the birds. They kept perfectly still. When she was fast asleep Cocktail whispered to Feltie to move up to her, and did so himself, getting as near her warm breath as possible. Feltie followed his example. And thus they passed the night, tolerably warm and comfortable, and even sleeping. Puss never offered to stir, and was still fast asleep when they left her in the morning.

The next day, no breakfast. Not a morsel of food was to be found anywhere. The fields were deep in snow. Once they tried a rickyard, but the farmer’s son came out with his gun, and they had to take to flight again, frightened out of their lives. Their wings were getting feeble, and they often had to alight on the ground and rest; and after resting, every fresh starting was more difficult than the last. Cocktail said little, and seemed to be getting deaf and sleepy; Feltie had to take the lead and keep the lookout. They passed at midday over some lower-lying country,[5] and then, almost without knowing it, they once more found themselves upon a high, bleak table-land of never-ending down.[6] As night fell they sank quite exhausted on the sheltered side of a high hill, whose flanks were clothed thickly with gorse, hoping that some friendly hare might again favour them with her company.

In the middle of the night Cocktail suddenly spoke: “Feltie,” he said, “we ought to have stayed in that park. If I had known what was coming I would have stayed, but one can’t know everything. You may have to go on without me to-morrow; if I can’t fly, you must go on. I’m your leader, and this is my last order. Go on till you get food, and when the frost goes, come back this way if you care to. If you don’t find me, tell Jack and Jill that they were right, and I was wrong. Good-night once more, old Feltie; mind and do as I tell you.”

Cocktail said these last words with something of his old cheerful tone of authority; then he put his head under his wing again. Feltie said nothing, but nestled closer to him. When morning broke, and Feltie ruffled his feathers and looked about him as usual, Cocktail did not do the same. His head was still under his wing, but not a feather stirred; Cocktail was dead, and frozen hard. Feltie shuddered and flew away, hardly knowing where he went.

It did not indeed much matter which way he went. Death was all around. The only living creature abroad was a wandering carrion crow, whose melancholy croak seemed to tell that he too was starving. The broad white pall lay silently over the whole plain; the sky was still overcast, and the wind blew from the north-east with hardly less cruel violence than on the day before. It was more the wind than his own wings that carried Feltie along. Those wings were stiff and painful, and would do their work no longer. And he, too, like poor Cocktail, was getting drowsy with hunger and fatigue; life was going slowly out of him. He did not feel much pain; he simply kept getting every minute more tired, more sleepy, and, strange to say, more comfortable.

After a time he came to the edge of a steep hill, at the foot of which was a straggling village. It looked desolate enough, for the thatched roofs were covered with snow, and tall elms above them swayed in the howling wind. Beyond the village were some flat meadows, full of ditches, and divided by a stream not yet quite frozen over; on the other side of the meadows the downs rose steeply again. Feltie had not enough life left in him to feel that there was any hope for him in this valley; he was simply drifting like a dead leaf or a snowflake, and it little mattered where he stopped. Somewhere the leaf would settle and decay, somewhere the snowflake would drop and melt: somewhere too the poor starving bird must rest from his last flight, and sink into a never-ending sleep. The wind took him over the brow of the hill, and with a series of little flights, ever growing shorter and feebler, he made his way down the white slope, and settled, almost stupefied, under the leeward side of a large barn, which stood close to a farmhouse on the outskirts of the village. There he sat crouching, his head sunk into his neck, his tail and wings drooping, his eyes half closed—a very different bird from the Feltie who had started on his journey three days before, quite unconscious of trouble and pain.

What was this? Human voices, laughter, coming round the corner of the barn! Feltie had never been so near a human being before. He tried to fly, but it was impossible; no strength was left. His heart beat, and he crouched closer to the ground. Then two small ploughboys, shouting and snowballing each other, burst round the barn; the foremost, seeing Feltie, at once ran up and seized him, thus offering a splendid aim to his pursuer, who sent a snowball at him which took deadly effect on him. But the first boy popped Feltie into his pocket, and ran off, crying out as he ran:

“I’se got a bird: thee sha’n’t have none of un!”

Down the village street he ran, making for his father’s cottage, but had got no farther than the vicarage gate, which was half way down the street, when another well-compacted snowball, delivered from behind the gate, knocked his hat off into the road, and filled one ear with snow which at once began to trickle gently down his neck. He looked up with a red face, and saw the vicar’s son, a boy of fourteen, swinging on the gate and laughing with all his might.

“Oh, that was a beauty!” he said: “Oh, that was a tickler for you, Bill!”

“Thou beest a beast,” was Bill’s reply. He didn’t mean a pun, but perhaps there was a pleasant emphasis in the doubled syllable. “Thou beest a beast, thou beest.”

“What’s that?” said the swinger on the gate suddenly jumping down. “What am I? I’ll teach you—” But Bill did not stop to hear what he was to be taught. He took to his heels again and ran like a deer. But the vicar’s son was more than a match for awkward Bill at running, and in less than a hundred yards he collared him and had him down in a twinkling on the snow in the deserted street.

“I’ll teach you to call me names, you young cad.” And he began his lesson by scientifically “bagging” Bill’s wind.

“Doan’t thee pummel I, doan’t thee now,” said panting Bill. “I’ll gi’ thee a bird I’se got in my pocket, if thee woan’t pummel I no more.”

“Where’s the bird? Get up and show it me directly, you young lubber,” said his conqueror, keeping a fast hold of his prisoner’s collar, the better to secure the execution of the bargain. Bill sulkily obeyed, and produced Feltie from his pocket. But the jolting and banging produced by Bill’s headlong flight in his heavy hob-nailed boots had been too much for Feltie; he still breathed, but his eyes were shut and he was in fact quite unconscious of what was going on. The vicar’s boy let go Bill’s collar, and taking Feltie in both hands, began to walk back to the vicarage gate.

In two minutes he and Feltie were in the snug warm drawing-room of the vicarage, where his mother and three sisters were sitting by the fire at work.

“My dear George,” said the mother from her armchair as the boy came in, “how can you go out a day like this without a greatcoat? And what in the world have you got there?”

“Don’t be frightened, mother,” said George, as he sat down on the hearthrug to thaw; “it’s only a fieldfare.”

“What is a fieldfare, George?” asked his youngest sister.

“First of all, Miss Minnie,” answered George, “a fieldfare is a bird; secondly, it’s a kind of thrush; thirdly, it only comes here in winter; fourthly, it eats berries; and fifthly, if you don’t go and get some brandy quickly, this one will die, for it’s all skin and bone, and hasn’t had the ghost of a berry inside it this last week, I should say.”

“Brandy, George! Who ever heard of a bird drinking brandy!”

“Now do you ladies want to save this bird’s life, or do you not?” said Master George impatiently. “Because if you do, Minnie will go and shut up the cat and dog, and Edith go and get some drops of brandy, and Katie will get me a quill pen to pour the brandy down his throat with, and mother—”

“And mother will take care of the bird until George has changed his jacket, for he’s dripping on to the hearthrug like old Father Christmas,” said the mother, and quietly took Feltie out of his hand into her lap, where she began to stroke him gently. “Now, George, make haste, or he’ll die before you’re down again.”

They all ran off on their several commissions, and when George came down again, still putting on his jacket in his hurry, they were all assembled round the mother, who had Feltie on a napkin in her lap, and was cutting a quill pen into a proper shape for giving him the first and last medicine he ever had in his life. George held the bird’s beak open, while she deftly contrived to slip a single drop of brandy in half a teaspoonful of water down his throat; in five minutes she gave him another dose, and then another; and now Feltie’s eyes opened wide, and his feathers began to quiver slightly all over him.

“Now, mother, put your two hands over him, and keep him quite warm for a bit. He’ll do, I expect,” said George.

It was a bold experiment to give a bird brandy-and-water, but on this occasion it answered its purpose. In another hour or two Feltie was able to eat a few shreds of meat, which were given him at the suggestion of the vicar, who had now come in, and was taking much interest in his recovery. Then he wanted to go to sleep, but the bright light of the room made him feel very uncomfortable, and the loud human voices sounded harsh and strange in his ears. There was much discussion as to where he should be put for the night; but the vicar decided that he should sleep in the conservatory, which was warmed with hot water. So they carried him there in procession, and left him in a warm corner on a heap of the gardener’s matting, with plenty of scraps of meat and crumbs, and a saucer of water if he should be thirsty in the night. So Feltie fell fast asleep, and dreamt of poor Cocktail all alone and frozen under the gorse on Salisbury plain; and George too fell fast asleep in his snug bed, and dreamt that a whole flock of fieldfares were come to the vicarage, asking for brandy-and-water to be given them with a quill pen.

Next morning George was down betimes, half dressed, and in a state of great excitement, to see how his fieldfare was getting on. But Feltie was awake still earlier, and had already taken his breakfast when George opened the conservatory door. He felt quite strong again, and with his strength had returned all his dread of human beings. So no sooner was the boy inside the door, than he began to flutter among the plants, and then flew up to the glass roof and tried to struggle through it. Then he came down again, and smelling the fresh air coming through the door, was attracted in that direction, and in another minute was free. Off went George after him—over the garden wall, where he dropped a slipper, for he had not had time to put on his boots; across the road, through the hedge, which tore his trousers and scratched his face; over the orchard, and up into the stubble-field beyond, where a shepherd who was tending the new-born lambs that had been dropped in spite of the snowstorm, was much astonished to see the vicar’s son tearing along without a hat, without his boots, and with his usually neat collar flying behind him secured by only a single button. But still Feltie went on, and George, seeing that he was able to shift for himself, gave up the pursuit, and consoled himself by a talk with the shepherd about the young lambs and their mothers, before he went home to dress and tell his tale.

Meanwhile Feltie had perched on a hedge some distance away, and began to look about him. “What was this he felt? Surely it was not so cold, and the wind was blowing gently from the south-west. Was not the snow melting?” (Master George’s right foot had found that out as soon as he got over the garden-wall.) “Was not it beginning to rain?”

“Chak-chak! Chak-chak!” cried Feltie, suddenly finding his voice: “the storm is over, the fields will be soft again, the worms will come to the surface, and perhaps the sun will shine again soon! Chak-chak!”

His voice was answered feebly from a distance. Then over a hedge came half-a-dozen fieldfares, flying weakly, as he had done the day before. He joined them, and they gave him welcome, and told him how they too had gone southwards, a brave band of fifteen, of whom only six were now alive; how they had gone on and on till they had reached a stormy sea which they were too weak to cross; and how they had turned back again in despair, and were now returning northwards.

Feltie told them his story too; and then the seven set out on their journey; and in the afternoon the sun shone warmly out of the rainy clouds, the lark rose in the air and sang, the robins sat on moist twigs and cheered them with a strain as they passed; the streams rose, full of melting snow, and rushed over their banks into the meadows, moistening them and making them soft and pleasant to the searching bills of hungry birds: the air was soft, wet, and delicious, and in the fields they heard the bleating of the young lambs, and the calls of neighbouring parties of fieldfares and redwings.

At last when they neared the familiar spot which Feltie had left but a few days before, he bade farewell to his fellow-travellers and turned with a beating heart in the direction of the well-known elm-trees, standing in the flat meadows where the stream wound here and there under its brambly archway.

His loud “chak-chak” was answered: there were some old friends there still. There was Jill: and there too was Jack: they had saved their lives, then, by staying in the friendly park among the thorn-trees. But that terrible storm had done its work upon the little company: more than half were still missing, and Feltie himself was almost the last straggler to arrive. Many an adventure had to be narrated, and many a story of struggle for life and death; but there was none so thrilling as the winter’s tale that Feltie had to tell, and no loss so sadly to be bewailed as the death of the brilliant Cocktail in the gorse on the dreary frozen down.

OUT OF TUNE.

“Spirits are not finely touched
But to fine issues.”

In a certain manufacturing town, of no great size, there lived a musician. For the most part he gained his living by playing at concerts and giving lessons; but he was young, ardent, and clever, and he had always nursed a hope that he might one day be a great composer. He felt a soul of music within him, that wanted to come out and express itself. But, though he had had a complete training in composition, and had written much music and published a little, no one took any notice of what he composed; it was too good to sell well (so he used to say, and perhaps it was true), and he had never had a chance of having any of his larger works performed in public. And he began to get rather irritable and impatient, so that his wife was sometimes at her wits’ end to know how to cheer him up and set him to work once more with a good heart.

Great was the poor man’s delight when one day a letter arrived from the town clerk, to tell him that on the approaching visit of the Prince of Wales to open the new Town Hall, a grand concert was to be given, in which works by natives of the town were to be performed; and that he was invited to write a short cantata for voices and orchestra. A liberal sum was to be paid him, and he was to train his own choir, to have the best artists from London to help him, and to conduct his composition himself. The news put him in such a state of high spirits that now the prudent wife was obliged to pour a little cold water on his ambition, and tell him that he must not expect too much success all at once. But she made him comfortable in their little parlour, and kept the neighbours from breaking in upon his work; and for some time the cantata went on at a flowing pace, until nearly half of it was done.

After a while however the musician’s brain began to rebel against being kept in all day hard at work, and to refuse to keep quiet and rest in soothing sleep at night. It said as plainly as possible—“If you will go on driving me in harness all day long, I shall be obliged to fidget at night, and what is more, it is quite impossible for me to do such good work in the day as I used to. So take your choice: either you must give me repose sometimes, or I must cease to be able to find you beautiful melodies, and to show you how to treat them to the best advantage.” But the musician did not know that his brain was complaining in this way, though his wife heard it quite well; and he went on driving it harder than ever, whipping it up and spurring it on, though it had hardly any strength left to pull the cantata along with it. And all this time he was shutting himself away from his friends, who used formerly to come often and refresh him with a friendly chat in the evenings; he refused to go with his wife and visit the very poor people whom they had been in the habit of comforting out of their slender store; he lost his temper several times with his pupils, and one day boxed a boy’s ears for playing a wrong note twice over, so that the father threatened to summon him before the magistrates and have him fined for assault; and his wife began at last to fear that his stroke of good luck had done him more harm than good.

One morning he got up after a restless night, in which his poor brain had been complaining as usual without being taken any notice of, and settled himself down in the parlour after breakfast with the cantata, feeling worried and tired both in his body and mind. With great labour and trouble he finished the last chorus of his first part, and uttered a sigh of relief. The next thing to be done was to write the first piece of the second part, which was to be an air for a single voice, and was to be sung at the concert by one of the best singers in the country. All the rest of the cantata had been thought out carefully before he began to write; but this song, for which beautiful words were chosen from an old poet, had never worked itself out in his brain so as to satisfy him. And now the poor brain was called upon for inspiration, just at a time when it was hardly fit even to do clerk’s work.

He tried to spur it up with a pipe of tobacco, but not a bit would it budge. Then he took a dose of sal volatile; but the effect of it only lasted a few minutes, and then he felt even more stupid than before. Then he opened the window and looked out into their little back-garden, just as a gleam of sunshine shot down through a murky sky. This made him feel a little better, and he returned to his desk, and sat for a few moments looking at the words which he was to set to music, feeling almost as if he were now going to make a little way. But the sunshine had also made the canary in the window feel a little warm-hearted, and it burst out into such a career of song, that the room seemed to be echoing all over with its strains. And all his own music fled at once out of the distracted composer’s head.

“You little noisy fiend!” he cried angrily, “putting in your miserable little twopenny pipe, when a poor human artist is struggling to sing. Don’t you know, you little wretch, that art is long and time is fleeting?”

He jumped up, took down the cage with an ungentle hand, and carried it into another room, where he drew a heavy shawl over it and shut the door. The canary’s song was stifled, but the musician’s song was not a bit the better for it. And after a while there came another annoyance. The house was small and not very solidly built, and though the room where he was at work did not look out on the street, any street-calls, bands, hurdy-gurdys, or such like noise-making enemies, could be heard there quite distinctly. This time it was a street-boy whistling a tune; it was not a bad tune, and it was whistled with a good heart; indeed the boy put so much energy into his performance, that he must have been in very high spirits. And why did he stop there so long? Generally they passed by, and the tails of their tunes disappeared in the distance, or they turned down the next street. But this one was clearly stopping there on purpose to annoy the composer.

He went softly into the front room, keeping out of sight from the window. He was seized with a desire to wreak vengeance on this tormentor, but he was not quite clear how to do it, and must survey his ground first. Stepping behind the window-curtain, he peeped out between the curtain and the window-frame, and saw a small boy, whistling hard, with a long string in his hand, which descended into the area below. The musician stood on tiptoe, and looked down into the area; it was a sort of relief to him to see what this urchin was about. At the end of the string he perceived a dead mouse, which was being made to jump up and down and counterfeit life, as well as was possible under the circumstances, for the benefit of a young cat of the household, who was lying in wait for it, springing on it, and each time finding it drawn away from her just as she thought her claws were fast fixed in it. This boy was in fact an original genius, who had invented this way of amusing himself; he called it cat-fishing, and it was excellent sport.

The musician suddenly flung up the window, and faced the boy, who seemed by no means disconcerted; he only left off whistling and looked hard at the musician.

“What are you doing with the cat?” said the latter, with all the dignity he could put on. “What business have you to meddle with my cat, and make that infernal din in front of my house?”

The boy began slowly to haul up the string, looking all the while steadily at the composer.

“I say, guv’nor,” he said, with a mock show of friendly interest, “do you know as you’ve got a blob of ink at the end o’ your nose?”

The composer was taken aback. He certainly did not know it, but nothing was more likely, considering how he had been pulling his moustache and scratching his head with fingers which, as he glanced at them, showed some traces of ink. He put his hand involuntarily to his nose, and half turned to the glass over the chimney-piece. There was not a stain there: the nose was innocent of ink. Instantly he returned to the window, but the boy was gone; all that was left of him was a distant sound of “There’s nae luck aboot the house” far down the street. The composer went gloomily back to his study, without a particle of music in his brain; the canary and the whistler had driven it all away. He sat down mechanically at his desk, but he might as well have sat down at the kitchen-table and tried to make it play like a piano.

He got up once more, and looked out of the window. The sun was again shining, and the little garden, fenced in between brick walls which caught the sunshine, and enlivened with a few annuals (for it was early summer), did not look altogether uninviting. At the end of it was a little arbour which he had built himself, and a rose tree that he had planted against it was already beginning to blossom. The composer thought he would go and quiet himself down in this little arbour, and try and get his thoughts fixed upon the air he was to write. Out he went, and seated there, began to feel more at ease. After a while he began to think once more of the old poet’s lines; and feeling as if music were coming into his brain again, went and fetched his manuscript and his pen and ink, to be ready in case he should have musical thoughts to write down.

Suddenly there broke in upon his peace the loud, shrill song of a wren. It was close to him, just outside the arbour; and when a wren sings close to you, it pierces your ears like the shrillest whistle ever blown by schoolboy. It was all unconscious of the presence of the composer so close to its nest, which it had built in the branches of the rose-tree that climbed up outside; and it hopped down for a moment on the gravel just in front of the arbour to pick up some fragment of food. The composer’s nerves were quite unstrung by its sudden outburst of self-asserting song; it was an insult to music, to the poet, and to himself. No sooner did the tiny bird appear, as complacent and hearty as all wrens are, than he seized the ink-bottle, and like Luther at Wittemburg, flung it wildly at the little fiend that thus dared to disturb his peace. Of course he missed his aim; of course he broke the ink-bottle and spilt the ink; and alas! when he returned from picking up the bits, a splash from the bottle had fallen in a grand slanting puddle over the neat manuscript of the last page of the chorus which concluded his second part. And as he stood beholding it in dismay, lo! the voice of that irrepressible little wren, as shrill and pert as ever, only a little further off!

If the musician had not quarrelled with his brain, and if the struggle between them had not put his nerves all out of tune—if he had been then the gentle and sweet-tempered artist he generally was—he would have laughed at the idea of such a little pigmy flouting him in this ridiculous way. As it was, he growled under his breath that everything was against him, crushed his hat on his head, took the manuscript into the house and locked it up in a drawer, wrote a hurried note to his wife, who had gone put, to say he had gone for a long walk and would not be back till late, and sallied out of the house where no peace was any longer possible for him.

He walked fast, and was soon out of the town and among the lanes. They were decked with the full bloom of the wild roses, and the meadows were golden with buttercups; but these the composer did not even see. Birds sang everywhere, but he did not hear them. He was just conscious that the sun was shining on him, but his eyes were fixed on the ground, and his mind was so full of his own troubles that there was no room in it for anything nicer to enter there. He was thinking that his song would never be written, for he could not bear to write anything that should be unworthy of those words, or second-rate as music; and it seemed as if his brain would never again yield him any music that he could be satisfied with. “I shall be behindhand,” he thought to himself. “I shall have to write and say I can’t carry out my undertaking; my one chance will be lost, and all my hopes with it. I shall lose my reputation and my pupils, and then there will be nothing left but beggary and a blighted life!” And he worked himself up into such a dreadful state that when he was crossing a river by a bridge, it did actually occur to him whether it would not be as well to jump over the parapet and put an end to his troubles once for all. His mind was so full of himself that for a moment he forgot even his wife and child, and all his friends and well-wishers.

He stood by the parapet for some minutes looking over. The swallows and sand-martins were gliding up and down, backwards and forwards through the bridge, catching their food and talking to themselves. A big trout rose to secure a mayfly from the deep pool below, and sent a circle of wavelets spreading far and wide. A kingfisher flashed under the bridge, all blue and green, and shot away noiselessly up the stream; and then a red cow or two came down to drink, and after drinking stood in the water up to their knees, and looked sublimely cool and comfortable. And the river itself flowed on with a gentle rippling talk in the sunshine, hushing as it entered the deep pool, and passing under the bridge slowly and almost silently—“like an andante passing into an adagio,” said the musician to himself; and he walked on with eyes no longer fixed on the ground, for even this little glimpse of beauty from the bridge had been medicine to the brain, and it wanted more—it wanted to see and to hear more things that were beautiful and healing.

He went on, still gloomy, but his gloom was no longer an angry and sullen one. Through his eyes and ears came sensations that gradually gladdened his heart, and relieved the oppression on his brain: he began to notice the bloom on the hedges and in the fields; and the singing of the larks high in air, though he hardly attended to it, made part of the joyousness of nature which was beginning to steal into his weary being. Presently he came to a little hamlet, hardly more than a cottage or two, but with a little church standing at right angles to the road. The churchyard looked inviting, for rose-bushes were blooming among the graves, and it was shut out from the road by a high wall, so that he would be unobserved there. He walked in and sat down on a tombstone to rest.

He had not been there long, and was beginning to feel calmed and quieted, when there broke out on him from the ivied wall the very same shrill wren’s song that had so wounded his feelings in the morning. It sent a momentary pang through him. There started up before his eyes the broken ink-bottle, the smeared page, the bitter vexation and worry, and the song not even yet begun. But the battle of body and brain was no longer being waged, and as the tiny brown bird sang again and again, and always the same strain, he began to wonder how such cheerful music could ever have so maddened him. It brought to his mind a brilliant bit of Scarlatti, in which a certain lively passage comes up and up again, always the same, like a clear, strong spring of water bubbling up with unflagging energy, and with a never-failing supply of joyousness. And the wren and Scarlatti getting the better of him, he passed out of the churchyard, and actually began to feel that he was hungry.

Just across the road was a thatched cottage, standing in a little garden gay with early summer flowers; beehives stood on each side of the entrance, and a vine hung on the walls. It looked inviting, and the musician stepped over the little stile, and tapped at the door, which was open. A woman of middle age came forward.

“Can you tell me,” said he, “whether there is an inn anywhere near where I could get some bread and cheese?”

She answered that there was no inn nearer than the next village, two miles away. “But you look tired and pale, sir. Come in and have a morsel before you go on; and a cup of tea will be like to do you good. Sit you down in the porch and rest a bit, and I’ll bring you something in a moment.”

The musician thanked her, and sat down in the porch by the beehives. It was delicious there!—bees, flowers, sunshine; on the ground the shadows of the vine-leaves that were clustering unkempt above his head; in the distance golden meadows and elm-trees, and the faint blue smoke of the town he had left behind him. Outside the porch hung a cage, in which was a skylark, the favourite cage-bird of the poor; it had been interrupted in its song by the stranger’s arrival, but now began again, and sang with as good a heart and as lusty a voice as its free brethren in the blue of heaven.

“What a stream of song!” thought the musician. “He sings like good old Haydn! We can’t do that now. We don’t pour out our hearts in melody, and do just what we like with our tunes.”

The lark ceased for a moment, and the ticking of the big clock within the cottage suddenly called up in his mind the andante of the Clock Symphony, and the two bassoons ticking away in thirds with that peculiar comical solemnity of theirs; and he leant back in the porch and laughed inside himself till the lark began to sing again. Then he went on mentally to the last allegro vivace, and caught up by its extraordinary force and vivacity, his brain was dancing away in a flood of delicious music, when the woman came out to him with a cup of tea and bread and butter.

“How that bird does sing!” he said to her. “It has done me worlds of good already!”

“Ah,” she answered, “he has been a good friend to us too. It was my boy that gave him to me—him as is away at sea. He sings pretty nigh all the year round, and sometimes he do make a lot of noise; but we never gets tired of him, he minds us so of our lad. Ah, ’tis a bad job when your only boy will go for to be a sailor. I never crosses the road to church of a stormy morning and sees the ripples on the puddles, but I thinks of the stormy ocean and my poor son!”

The musician asked more about the sailor; and he was shown his likeness, and various relics of him that the fond mother had cherished up. And when he rose to go he shook hands with the woman warmly, and told her that he would one day bring his wife and ask for another cup of tea. Then he started off once more, refreshed as much by the milk of human kindness as by the tea and bread and butter.

He soon began to feel sleepy, and looked for a quiet spot where he could lie down in the shade. Crossing two or three fields he came to a little dingle, where a stream flowed by a woodside; on the other side was a meadow studded with elms and beeches, and under the shade of one of these, close to the brook, and facing the wood, he lay down, and was soon fast asleep.

He was woke up by a musical note so piercing, yet so exquisitely sweet, a crescendo note of such wonderful power and volume, that he started up on his elbow and looked all round him. It was not repeated; but in a minute or two there came from the wood opposite him a liquid trill; then an inward murmur; then a loud jug-jug-jug; and then the nightingale began to sing in earnest, and carried the musician with him into a kind of paradise. He did not think now of the great composers; this was not Beethoven or Mozart; this was something new, and altogether rich and strange. Every time the bird ceased he was in suspense as to what would come next; and what came next was as surprising as what went before. At last the nightingale ceased, and dropped into the thick underwood; but the musician lay there still, and mused and dozed.

At length he started up and looked at his watch; it was past seven o’clock. He hurried off homewards in the cool air, refreshed and quieted, thinking of nothing but the things around him, and now and then of the cottage, the lark, the brookside, and the nightingale. But presently there came into his recollection the old poet’s lines, and he repeated them over to himself, for they seemed in harmony with his mood, and with the coolness, and the sunset. Then as a star comes out in the twilight, there came upon his mind a strain worthy to be married to immortal verse; like the star, it grew in brightness every moment, until he could see it clear and full. In a moment paper and pencil were in his hand, and the thought was fixed beyond all fear of forgetting. By the time he reached home, the whole strain was worked out in his mind, and he wrote the first draft of it that same evening, as he sat contented in his parlour, with his wife sewing by his side.

After this nothing went wrong with the cantata. It was finished, it was a great success, and the music to the old poet’s words was enthusiastically encored. The audience called loudly for the composer, and the Prince of Wales sent for him, and congratulated him warmly. And the day after the concert he took his wife out into the country, and they had tea at the cottage; the lark sang to them, the flowers were alive with murmuring bees, and the musician’s mind was free from all care and anxiety.

As they sat there, he told his wife the whole story of that eventful day, not even keeping from her the thought that had passed through his mind on the bridge. When he had finished, she laid her hand on his, and said, in her comfortable womanly way—

“You were out of tune, dear, that’s what it was. And you can’t make beautiful music, if you’re out of tune: everything you see and hear jars on you. You must tell me next time you feel yourself getting out of tune, and we’ll come out here and set you all right again.”

They went comfortably back to the town, after a day of complete happiness. As they neared their own door, they saw the street-boy leaning again over their railings, and cat-fishing as usual in the area. He was whistling with all his might; but this time it was “Weel may the keel row.” They took it as a good omen; and the astonished urchin found himself pounced on from behind, carried into the house by main force, and treated with cake, and all manner of good things, while the musician sat down to the piano and played him all the beautiful tunes he could remember. He did not come to fish in their area any more after this; but a few days later he was heard whistling “Vedrai carino” with an abstracted air, as he leant over a neighbour’s railings, amusing himself with his favourite pastime.

A JUBILEE SPARROW.

On the evening of the 21st of June, 1887, a cock sparrow sat on the roof of St. James’s Palace, in London, gazing down now into St. James’s Street, now into Pall Mall, where the preparations were almost finished for the Jubilee which was to take place next day. Flags were being fixed at all the windows, and Chinese lanterns hung out for the illuminations; seats were being everywhere contrived for the spectators, and all was bustle and activity. Every one seemed in good humour; it was plain that all were bent on showing the good Queen who had reigned fifty years without a blot on her fair fame, that their hearts went out to her in sympathy and goodwill. Yet any one skilled in the ways of birds, who could have seen the sparrow as he sat there, would have judged from the set of his feathers that his mind was very far from being at ease.

“There’s no time to lose,” he muttered to himself; “she’ll have to sit all day and all night, or we sha’n’t do it after all.” He flew down to a snug corner behind a tall brick chimney looking to the south, where his wife was sitting on a nest with four eggs in it.

“My dear,” he said; “you mustn’t leave the nest to-day; you know my hopes and wishes; you will disappoint me dreadfully if you can’t manage to hatch out an egg to-morrow. It really is our duty, as we live in a palace, to have a nestling hatched on the Jubilee day. Why, my people have lived here ever since the Queen came to the throne, and one of my ancestors was born on the very day of her accession! we must keep up the tradition, and, my dear, it all depends on you. Remember, I picked you out of a whole crowd down in St James’s Park, and I made no inquiries about your connections; you may have come from a Pimlico slum for all I know. But I saw you had good qualities and I asked no questions. Now do try and do yourself justice. Sit close, and don’t on any account leave the eggs, and I will bring you all sorts of good things from the Prince of Wales’ own kitchen.”

The hen sparrow fluttered her wings a little and meekly assured her husband that she would do her best. “It’s hard work,” she added; “my poor breast is getting quite bare, and I’m so hungry. But I’ll sit till August to please you, you beautiful and noble bird.”

“That’s right,” said the cock sparrow, much pleased; and indeed he was a fine bird, with his black throat and blue head, and mottled brown back. He flew straight down to the back door of Marlborough House, where the Prince of Wales lives (he patronized no human beings but royalty and the aristocracy), and finding the usual supply of crumbs and scraps put out by the royal kitchen-maid, he made a good meal first himself, and then set to work to carry his wife her supper.

The day was very hot and very long, and the warmth greatly helped the weary hen in performing her duties. She stuck to her post all the time she was having her supper, and she knew that her eggs would soon be hatched; but neither she nor her husband had quite reckoned for the warmth of the day. Just when the cock was going to roost, well satisfied with his wife, and certain that his fondest hopes would be realized to-morrow, crack, crack! peep, peep! out came a tiny sparrow from the egg in the warmest corner of the nest, full three hours before the Jubilee day was to begin!

She called her husband—

“Oh what a little darling,” she cried. “Oh, what a lovely little yellow beak! and what a sweet crumply little red skin!” And she forgot all about the Jubilee.

“What a horrid little wretch you mean,” said the cock sparrow. “An impudent, pushing little ugly brute, to come out just at the wrong time! And he would have seized it and thrust it out of the nest, if the poor delighted mother had not spread her wings quite over it.

“Oh, don’t be so cruel,” she said, “please don’t; I’ll hatch another to-morrow, if I possibly can. I’ll sit all day, and never even want to go and see the procession, as you promised I should.”

“Very well,” said the cock. “You stay here and sit close till you’ve hatched another. Not one bit of food shall that little monster have from me, till his brother is born. And if he is not born to-morrow, it’ll be very much the worse for you, my dear!”

He went to roost again, and his wife cuddled herself down once more on the eggs, and fondled her little new-born chick. All night long the hammering of boards went on in the streets below, where the preparations were being finished for the procession, and the poor hen passed a very sleepless night. Her body was tired, and she was dreadfully afraid of her husband’s anger, if she should fail in her duty. “But, after all,” she thought, “one must go through a good deal if one is to have a husband who lives in a palace and is connected with the highest families in the land!”

The next day was, as we all remember, another very hot one. The sun blazed down upon the poor hen sparrow, who was obliged to keep sitting close all day, until she really thought she must have died with heat and anxiety. Not for one minute would her husband allow her to leave the nest and look at the processions. He perched on a chimney whence he could see her on the nest, and also see the procession coming through from Buckingham Palace; and he described it all to her from his chimney, but what was the good of that? She might just as well have read it in the newspapers the next morning.

All day long she sat on those three remaining eggs, and it really seemed as if they would never crack. The cock got more and more angry and impatient. “We shall be disgraced,” he cried, when the processions were all over, and still no second chick; “we shall be disgraced, and we shall have to leave the Palace. I shall, at least; you may stay if you like: you have no connection with the royal family and no sense of shame.”

The hen could say nothing. She was doing her best, poor thing, and she could do no more. Hour after hour passed, and still no egg burst. At last, as the big clock on the Palace struck seven, crack! peep!—a second little sparrow poked out its bill into this wicked world.

The cock sparrow was in a state of wild excitement. He pushed his wife off the nest, and declared he was going to take charge of it all himself.

“Oh, what a beauty!” he exclaimed; “so different from that other little wretch! Fly at once, my dear, to Buckingham Palace, and let Her Majesty know. She’ll be delighted. And only think if you were to bring back some crumbs from the hand of royalty itself! I’ll take care of it meanwhile.”

Off flew poor weary Mrs. Sparrow on her errand. But when she got to Buckingham Palace, she didn’t know how to find the Queen; so she flew down into Palace Road, and picked up a crumb or two in front of a baker’s shop there, which she brought home in her beak.

“Well done!” cried her husband, without waiting to ask where they came from. “Crumbs from Her Majesty’s own hand! wasn’t she

delighted? Did she say it was to be called ‘Jubilee,’ in honour of the day? Of course she did. Jubilee he shall be; and there isn’t another young one in London to compare with him.”

There was indeed a terrible to-do made about this little nestling, which was ugly enough in the eyes of every one but its parents. The news of it spread about, and from all parts of London sparrows came to see it. All sorts of tales were told of it, and the further you got from St. James’s, the more wonderful they were. In the Strand they told how the bird broke the egg as the Queen was passing by, and how Her Majesty happened to look up to see what o’clock it was, and seeing the old sparrow on the roof, bowed to him most graciously. Further east, the sparrows of St. Paul’s Cathedral narrated how a bird had been born on the roof of Buckingham Palace, just over the Queen’s own bedroom window, and how Her Majesty, on hearing the news, had sent for a long ladder, and ordered the Lord Chamberlain to take up some choice dainties to the parents on a plate of solid gold. And far away in the East-end, the black and sooty sparrows who inhabit those parts, and who firmly believe themselves and their race to be the most important part of the whole population of London, were much stirred by a rumour that a sparrow had been born in the West-end, which had been declared by the Queen to be heir to the throne, and that the days of the rule of man were coming to an end, and the sparrows were going to have it all their own way.

Thus the fame of little Jubilee spread over the whole of London, and even into the country, for the sparrows that were going out of town for the summer carried the news with them, and the whole world of sparrows were in a few days chattering and quarrelling about it.

Meanwhile Jubilee was being stuffed with all sorts of good things, and in the second week of his existence very nearly died of over-eating. If he had been fed with wholesome flies, like the others, he would have taken no hurt; but his father was always bringing bread-crumbs from the Prince of Wales’s back-door, and these, when forced down the wide-open yellow throat of poor Jubilee, were apt to choke him sadly.

“Never mind,” said the father, “it will all help to strengthen his blood, and make him a fit neighbour for kings and princes!”

Luckily the entreaties of his mother, who declared he would die if he were not fed properly, had some effect, and Jubilee grew to be a fledgling without falling a victim to his own greatness. When he was ready to leave the nest, the others, who had been carefully brought up to consider themselves nobodies, and to bow before Jubilee in everything, were told to go and shift for themselves—their mother might look after them if she liked. As for Jubilee, he was to be under his father’s care for a while longer, and to be introduced to the world where he was to cut such a great figure. He had by this time, as you may suppose, come to think a good deal of himself; and to say the truth, there was no such conceited young jackanapes of a sparrow to be found in the whole of London. But all the parent sparrows had taught their young ones to look up to him, and his high mightiness had things pretty much his own way.

The royal families being by this time gone out of town, it was not possible to have him presented at court; so the father sparrow was obliged to be content with taking him to the water in the park, to introduce him to the ducks. He did indeed drop a hint or two about going to Windsor Castle when Jubilee should be strong enough; but he had never been so far himself, and had some doubts in his own mind as to his reception by the rival sparrows of that royal residence. Supposing they had produced a Jubilee sparrow there too! It might be wiser not to go so far a-field.

The ducks were very gracious to Jubilee. They informed him that they were the property of the state, and under the especial care and patronage of the nobility and gentry. They lamented that the royal princes and princesses did not often come to feed them, and told him how two centuries ago, that excellent monarch Charles the Second had made it a regular practise and duty to walk in the park for the purpose of throwing bread to the ducks of that day. They said that Jubilee might come every day and share the things that were given them.

So Jubilee led a happy life for a while in the society of the ducks, and became more vain than ever. He was very bold, and would hardly get out of the way of the passers-by. And this vanity and boldness led to a turn in the fortunes of this sadly spoilt young bird, which it is now our painful duty to relate.

One day he was left by his father with the Ducks, and was listening to their aristocratic conversation, taking a bathe in the water now and then, and preening himself in the sunshine, when two very ragged and dirty boys came by. One of them had a large hunk of bread which he was eating, and as he passed the ducks he threw them a few crumbs. The ducks did not mind where they got their bread; whether it were given them by a monarch or a street-boy was all the same to them; and young Jubilee of course did as they did. So it came to pass that he flew down from the bush where he happened to be perching at the moment, and dexterously picked up a crumb which had fallen just at the edge of the water.

The boys, seeing this, threw him another and then another, nearer and nearer to themselves; and Jubilee, in all his pride and self-confidence, came close up to them. Suddenly one of the boys whipped off his cap, and flung it with such good aim, that it knocked over poor Jubilee, and half stunned him; the other boy instantly pounced down upon him, and he was a prisoner in a pair of grimy hands. He called out loud to the ducks, but they only said “quack-quack,” and went off to the other side of the water, as they saw no more bread was coming.

“Serves him right!” said an old drake: “you ducks made such a fuss about that little piece of impudence, that he was getting quite unbearable.”

Meanwhile, to prevent his escape, as he struggled and pecked with all his might, his captor put him into his pocket; where he found himself in company with a morsel of mouldy cheese, a half-eaten apple, two or three bits of string, the cork of a ginger-beer bottle, the head of a herring, and the bowl of an old clay pipe; all of which, combined with the dirtiness of the pocket itself, made up such a smell that Jubilee will never forget it to the last day of his life. The only comfort was that there was one place where light showed through the pocket; and for this he made and tried to struggle out. The boy, feeling him struggling, gave his pocket a slap, which quieted master Jubilee for a time; but after a while he recovered and began to make for fresh air again. This time the other boy saw his beak coming out and warned his companion in time; so Jubilee was taken out, and they tied the poor prisoner’s legs together with one of the bits of string, and put him into another pocket in company with a dead mouse. And now he had to lie still and take things as they came. He was tired out with fear, and struggling, and hardly had life enough left in him to be angry or cry out.

It was some time before he was released from the company of the dead mouse. When he was taken out of the pocket, he found himself in a dark and grimy room, with hardly any furniture, no fireplace, and only one small window high up in the wall. What a change from St. James’s Palace! He was in fact in the cellar of a small house in a back street in Westminster, where the father of the boys lived: a very poor man, whose wages were so small, even when he was lucky enough to get work, that he could only afford to rent a cellar; and here he and his wife and their two boys lived.

When the door was shut, Jubilee’s legs were untied and he was then put into a small box, in the lid of which one of the boys had bored a few small holes to give him air. Some crumbs were dropped through the holes, but they quite forgot to give him water, and the poor bird had to suffer great torments of thirst. When night came at last and the family lay down on their wretched mattresses in the corners of the room, Jubilee expected to get some sleep; but even this was denied him. No sooner was all quiet than the rats began to prowl about the room; and you may be sure they soon smelt out Jubilee. They came and climbed up on to the box, and when they heard him inside, they began to gnaw the wood between two of the holes. Luckily the nights were still short, and the poverty-stricken family were stirring early, or they would have got at Jubilee before morning. Even as it was, the poor bird, who used to sleep so peacefully after a good supper on the roof of the Royal Palace in the snuggest corner of the nest, had to spend his whole night within a few inches of half-a-dozen hungry monsters, who were thirsting for his blood. He was almost out of his mind by morning.

The boys had each a piece of bread given them for breakfast, some crumbs from which they gave their prisoner; and at the instance of their mother, they also gave him some water, and Jubilee felt a little better, and began to forget about the rats. Suddenly there came a knock at the door. The father had gone to work; the mother opened it. A man in uniform came in. Jubilee thought it must be a special messenger from the Queen, come to demand his instant release.

But it was only the School Board attendance officer, who had come to see why the boys were not at school. They shrank into a corner and presently made for the door, but the officer was too quick for them. He told their mother that he did not wish to have the father fined, and that if the boys would go to the school with him at once, and promise to go regularly, he would not summon him. The boys were frightened and went off with the officer: and Jubilee was left alone with the mother, who now began to try and clean up a bit, and make the room tidy; though, indeed, poor thing, she was too thin and starved to do any real work.

Soon she came to the box where Jubilee was.

“Ah, poor bird!” she thought to herself, “you have come out of fresh air, and away from kind friends, just as we did when we came to this dreadful London. Oh, why did I ever leave the village, and father and mother, and the orchards, and the meadows where we used to gather buttercups and tumble in the hay?” And she sat down on a broken chair by Jubilee’s box, and thought of the sweet air of the country, and wiped away a few slow tears with her apron. At last she got up, and took the box in her hands. “He’ll only starve here,” she thought, “and the rats will get at him. I’ve a great mind to let him go.” But then she thought how vexed the boys would be, and she gave up that idea. If she could only sell him they might all be the better for it. She would try and sell him for sixpence and they would buy a fourpenny loaf, and the boys should have a penny each to console them for the loss of their bird. She took him down the street in the box, turned down another street, and offered him at a shop where numbers of birds in cages were hanging in the window.

“Will you give me sixpence for this bird?” she asked. A pang went through Jubilee; to be sold for a sixpence, and he a royal bird!

The shopman, who was in his shirt (and very dirty it was), and had an evil face, and a short stubbly gray beard, looked with great contempt at Jubilee.

“Sixpence,” he shouted; “why, it’s only a sparrow!”

“Oh,” thought Jubilee, “if I could only tell him that I am a Jubilee sparrow, the only one in London, and worth a thousand times more than my weight in gold!” He had heard this so often from his father, that he at last had come to believe that if ever he really were to be sold they would weigh him and multiply the result by a thousand.

“Sixpence!” cried the shopman. “Sparrows are dear at a penny!”

The poor woman was sadly disappointed, and so indeed was Jubilee. She offered to sell the box as well, and after some bargaining, Jubilee and his box were handed over to the man for the sum of threepence, on which the starving family dined that day, and were thankful too.

Jubilee had not been long in the shop when the evil-faced man opened the box cautiously and seized him before he could escape. Once more his legs were tied together, and he was taken into a little dingy back room and laid upon a table. Then the man shut the door, lit a gas-lamp, and took out some paints and washes; and setting a canary in a cage before him, began to paint Jubilee’s feathers to imitate it.

“What a fat little brute you are,” he said, as he poked his dirty finger into the poor bird’s stomach. “But we’ll soon take that down; we’ll soon starve you into a nice slim canary. No more fat living for you, you little pig.”

Every feather of Jubilee’s wings and tail had to be painted separately, and washed before it was painted; and the poor worn-out bird had to lie there on the table all that day with his legs tied, and was given nothing to eat. After it was all over he was untied and put in a small cage, but kept in the same dingy inner room, away from the street. Two days later he was taken out again, and the whole process had to be gone over once more; and all this time he was getting thinner and thinner. It was a week after he had been sold, before he was pronounced fit to be taken into the shop, and hung in the window in his cage; a label was tied on to it on which was written—

“Canary, a Bargain.
“Warranted Sound. Only 3/6.”

Poor Jubilee! He was at least worth three and sixpence, and his affairs were beginning to go up again. If he could only have the luck to be bought by one of the royal family, all might be well again. But it was not to be. And for a long time nobody even offered to buy him. A fat bullfinch was sold, and Jubilee was quite glad to get rid of him; he was so fat, and so proud of his portly red waistcoat. Linnets and Goldfinches went, and others took their places, and there was always a pretty brisk sale of canaries. But Jubilee was neglected, probably because he used to sit on his perch and mope and ruffle his feathers, from hunger and hatred of the world. He looked sulky, and of course he never sang; so the customers would have nothing to say to him. It was a sad downfall for him, to sit in a cage all day and mope, and have faces made at him by street-boys, who loved to flatten their noses against the window and make all sorts of horrible noises and cat-calls, until the old man ran out with a stick and drove them away. But hunger and misfortune had done Jubilee some good, though it had made him very miserable. He had lost all his old pride, and had had all the nonsense knocked out of his head which his foolish father had stored up there.

One day he was sitting on his perch, dull and listless as usual, and terribly annoyed by the shrill singing of three canaries who were in the window with him, and were always making fun of him because he was only a sham canary and couldn’t sing; when two boys stopped at the window. They were of quite a different kind from any who had been there before; they did not flatten their noses against the glass, or make horrible noises; they wore good clothes, and had broad white collars which were quite clean, instead of dirty old handkerchiefs. They looked a good deal at Jubilee, and were evidently talking about him; but he could not hear what they said. At last they came into the shop and offered the old man two shillings for him.

“Make it half-a-crown,” said he, “and you shall have him;” for he was anxious to get rid of Jubilee. He might begin to moult, or the paint might wear off; and then there might be mischief.

The boys consented to give half-a-crown, and took Jubilee away with them. How glad he was to get out of that shop! Surely better times were coming! He was once more in the hands of the aristocracy, and certainly they handled him much more gently than the street boys. They carried him to a big house in Belgravia, put him in an empty cage, and began to examine him closely. Then they took him out and turned up his feathers.

“I thought so,” said one: “I told you so when we were looking at him through the window. That fellow’s a regular old thief. It’s nothing but a common sparrow. Run and ask father to come and see him.”

The other boy soon returned with a kind-looking gentleman, who laughed when he saw Jubilee, and told the boys they were lucky to have caught a well-known thief and impostor. Then he sent for a cab, took the cage and the boys, and drove down to the street where the old man lived, taking up a policeman on the way. And in another half-hour Jubilee found himself at a police-station; he was put in a sunny window, and the paint partly washed off him, the old man was locked up in a cell, and the gentleman and the boys were to come next day and give evidence.

The next day Jubilee was brought into court in his cage. It was not very pleasant; for he was half yellow and half his natural brown, and all the people laughed at him when he was handed up to the magistrate to be looked at. But a kind-hearted policeman, who had taken care of him the evening before, and given him seeds and water, had pity on him, and took him out of court as soon as he had been looked at, and washed the paint quite off him, and put him back in his sunny window. The case was soon proved, and when the old man had been sent away to prison for obtaining money on false pretences, the policeman asked the boys if he might keep the bird, as it was only a sparrow, and his sick wife would be very glad of it to keep her company while he was out on his beat. The boys gladly let him have it, and Jubilee was once more carried off in his cage to a new residence.

This was a small two-storied house in Pimlico. The policeman carried him up-stairs to his wife who lay ill in bed.

“Ah, Harry dear,” said she, “I’m so glad to see you; I’ve been waiting so long for you. I thought the morning would never come to an end. And what have you got there?”

“Something to make the time go quicker for you,” said the policeman; and he put the cage down on his wife’s bed, and told her the story of the sparrow.

“Poor bird,” said she, “poor thing. I can feel for him, as I’m caged up too, and can’t get out into the fresh air. But thank you, Harry, for thinking of me. He’ll be a companion to me, these long dreary mornings. But what shall we call him?”

“Well,” said Harry, “I reckon he’s about two months old; and to-day’s the 20th of August; so that just about takes us back to Jubilee day. I think he must have been born very near about the Jubilee. Let us call him Jubilee.”

And Jubilee felt that he was among friends, for now he had his right name, and was made much of, and was really of some use. And the policeman’s uniform was consoling too: for it brought back to his mind St. James’s Palace, and the policemen walking up and down the street below, and the scarlet-coated sentinels marching to and fro in front of the Prince of Wales’s gates.

And so two or three weeks went by, and Jubilee sat on his perch, and was fed well with seeds, and wished he could have sung like the canaries to show his gratitude and make the time pass quicker for the suffering wife. She grew paler and paler, and wearier and wearier, and seemed to take pleasure in nothing but Jubilee, and in looking for the time when her husband should come home. She would take the bird out of his cage, and he would hop about on the bed, and take seeds and crumbs out of her hand. He did not want to escape, and meet with new perils and adventures. Never had Jubilee been so happy before.

One day the doctor came, and told her husband that if his wife was ever to get well, she must go into the country for fresh air. It was hard on Harry, for he could not go with her; he must stay in London, and earn his living. But he took his savings out of the bank, and with these he contrived to get his wife taken to Victoria station, and thence in the train to the Sussex village where her parents lived. And of course Jubilee went with her.

I cannot stop to tell the wonders of that journey for Jubilee, or the delight of getting into pure fresh breezes among the Sussex downs. He was put into a window in an old red-brick cottage, where he soon learnt to forget all about London, and the pride of his early days, and all the horrors he had gone through. And, in spite of his being only a sparrow, and having never a song to sing, he was able to soothe the sick wife’s weary hours, and perhaps loved her as dearly as she loved him.

But she got no better; and one day the doctor said that a telegram must be sent at once to fetch her husband from London. When he came in the afternoon, she was lying unconscious, with Jubilee on a chair beside the bed. Jubilee did not know what followed; but before it was dark the policeman had taken his cage to the window and opened the door, saying in a voice that trembled as the bird had never heard it tremble before—

“We shall not want you any more, little Jubilee; go your way, and take our thanks with you.”

Jubilee flew out of the cage into the free air. What has since become of him I cannot tell you. But we may be sure that he did not go back to the perils of London streets, or to the pride and glory of a royal palace.

THE FALCON’S NEST.

Up the little street of thatched fishermen’s cottages, that ran inland from the stony beach and then curved away under the swelling down, there hurried early one May morning a dark-eyed girl, with a wounded pigeon in her hand. The wings of the bird were fluttering, as if it were in pain; a feather dropped here and there upon the road, and there was blood at its beak. The girl pressed it to her cheek in loving pity, and her loose dark brown hair fell over it, as the morning breeze followed her from the sea.

She stopped at a cottage gate, half way up the street, unlatched it with her free hand, passed through the little garden, and ran into the cottage without knocking. No one was in the little room.

“Harold!” she cried. “Harold! where are you?”

A boy of fifteen, tall and lithe, bonny-looking, and fair-haired, came in through the back door. He wore a blue jersey, and seemed made for a seafaring life.

“Why, Molly, it’s not seven o’clock, and we haven’t had breakfast yet. I thought you girls were in bed at this time of day. Hallo! What’s the matter with the pigeon?”

He took the bird out of her hand, for Molly, in spite of her fourteen years, had begun to cry, and could not answer his question. He turned the bird over gently and smoothed its feathers. Then he fell to stroking Molly’s hair.

“Poor old Molly,” he said soothingly. “Don’t cry. Was it the cat?”

Molly sat down, took the pigeon back from him, and dried her eyes on its silky plumage.

“No,” she said, still choking a little, “it wasn’t the cat, it was a terrible great bird. Why should he have come at my pigeon, that you gave me, when there were so many others for him? I saw him, as I was dressing, come right down, and just as he was seizing poor Snowdrop I threw my shoe at him and frightened him, and then he let go Snowdrop, and made a swoop into Mrs. Timms’s garden, and carried off another pigeon instead. Oh, the horrible, cruel creature!”

Harold gave a long whistle. “It’s the falcon,” he said, “from the red cliffs. I know him, the cruel brute! He’s got his nest there, Molly, and he’s feeding young ones. That’s why it is he comes here now. Never you mind, Molly,” he added, as he saw the pigeon was dead, “I’ll give you another, and what’s more, I’ll have those young falcons to make all safe.”

Molly looked at him with her usual admiring gaze. Harold and she had been playmates since they were small children and lived as next door neighbours, and though they did not see quite so much of each other now that Harold’s father was dead, and his mother had come to live in a smaller cottage further up the street, they were still as fond of each other as ever. Molly had long ago given up her whole soul to Harold: she had no secret from him. He had been a brother to her all her life, and even more than a brother. Perhaps if she had had any brothers they would have either despised her and kept her down, or they would have spoilt her, but Harold did neither. He was her sun, cheering and warming her; as to being obliged to do without him, that was a thing she had never thought of.

But some little time before the appearance of the falcon Harold had suddenly taken it into his head that he must go into the royal navy. A coast-guard friend of his had for some time been trying to persuade him to join a training-ship, but Harold had steadily refused, thinking that a fisherman’s free life was the happiest in the world. But as he grew older he began to discover that the fisherman’s freedom was bought at a high price. They had to sell their fish for very little, and other people made the money they ought to have had. And for a great part of the year very little was done in the way of fishing, except lobster-and crab-catching, and lobsters and crabs were getting scarcer than they used to be. There were in fact too many fishermen, and they were gradually catching all the crabs and lobsters on the coast. And so Harold at last came to the conclusion that if he was to support his mother in her old age he should set himself to some work which would make him sure of a fixed income, and if possible a rising one.

When Molly learnt that her Harold was actually going to leave her, and that in a few days she would see the last of him for a long time to come, her whole life seemed to be going to change. It was as if her boat had suddenly sprung a leak, and was sinking away from beneath her. The village, the bay, the beach, the lanes, could never be the same without Harold. She had been used to lean on him, to rest her whole being against his; and she did not know that even boys and girls, like men and women, must lose the props they make for themselves, and yet contrive somehow to stand without their help. Seeing her sorrowful eyes, and wishing to see them bright again, rather than feeling with her in her pain, he had given her the pigeon; and now the cruel falcon’s talons had torn her sensitive little heart almost as ruthlessly as the bird’s tender breast.

Harold came out of the cottage door and looked at the weather. It was a still spring morning with a silky mist lying about the hills, which would clear away if the slightest breeze got up.

“I’ll go to-day, Molly,” he said, “and you shall come with me if you like. We’ll have one jolly day together before I go to the training-ship. The tide runs eastward up till twelve, and will bring us back easily in the afternoon. Come down to the beach in half an hour: I’ll have the boat ready, and some bread and cheese. You ask your mother for some cold tea.” And Harold, delighted with his plan, and with his mind as cloudless as a sunny summer’s day, ran off to get his boat ready, hardly finding time to give Molly the kiss that her uplifted grateful face demanded of him.

In half an hour she and the boat were both ready, and they passed out of the little bay, she steering and he rowing, as the mist began to lift from the curving outlines of the downs. It was very restful to Molly to glide over that silky sea, with the gulls quietly sailing above, the breeze from the land just breathing on her, and Harold’s bright face opposite to her; and for a while she was perfectly happy, thinking of nothing. But suddenly the sound of a big gun reached them, and looking out to sea they saw the distant masts of a huge ironclad, and a white curl of smoke, which had already risen high in air by the time the sound reached them. As they looked, another white puff, and, as it slowly rose, another faint boom. Harold’s eyes sparkled, and he rested on his oars, and turned to watch the ship.

“I expect it’s the Monarch,” he said. “I know she’s cruising about here. Just think, Molly! Some day perhaps you’ll hear the big guns and I shall be on board. And thinking of you,” he added, as his face came round to look at Molly with a look half of pity, half of pride. But there was a big tear slowly slipping down Molly’s brown cheek. The thought of Harold’s going had come over her like a cloud, and the rain was beginning to fall. For a moment he felt angry; plunged the oars into the water, and rowed on strongly with just a faint flush on his cheek. Then seeing her face turned away, so that he should not see the tear, and the little mouth compressed and chin held firm so as to keep another from escaping, he shipped his oars, jumped across to her, and with boyish energy gave her a host of rough kisses on each cheek. Then he took her face between his hands and said—

“Molly, don’t you be silly. If you’re going to cry every time you hear a big gun fired I’ll sail right away to the other side of the world and marry some one over there. But if you’ll be a good girl I’ll come back some day and be a coastguard, and then we can live in one of those cottages by the flagstaff, and you shall polish the windows and the floors till they shine like mother’s china. And when I get to Portsmouth I’ll have a likeness taken in uniform, and you shall have it to hang up in your own room. Now then, let go, silly, or we shall be on the rocks!”

He disengaged himself from the fervid embrace in which Molly had caught him, and was back in his seat, pulling hard into the current of the tide again, which was now carrying them fast along the foot of the cliffs. They rounded one little headland, and then another, and presently found themselves under a deep curve of the cliffs, here some three or four hundred feet high, quite inaccessible from above, where the rocks were almost perpendicular, but broken somewhat at the base by the action of the sea. These cliffs—the red cliffs as they were called from their colour—were the favourite breeding place of many birds, and they were dotted all over, as the boat rounded the headland, with kittiwakes, guillemots, razorbills, and other sea-birds, who sailed up into the air, or far away to sea, with loud cries, as the intruders came nearer. Harold paid them little attention, but made straight across the curve towards the opposite headland, where the cliff seemed almost to beetle over, and where the shadow, as they had been rowing eastwards and it was still morning, lay heavy and black over the water. Here, he knew, the peregrine falcon built its nest nearly every year: for the nest could only be reached from the sea, and no hardy climber had as yet attempted to get at it by that way. Once the male bird had been shot, and for two or three years no nest had been built; but another pair had found the place out, and this year had been so far lucky enough to escape the guns of collectors and gamekeepers.

Harold put in to the shore, and moored the boat to a stone. No falcon was in sight. He told Molly to lie down in the boat quite still; and stretching himself beside her on his back, he fed her with bread and cheese, keeping a sharp lookout all the while. For a long time they lay there, and it was a happy time for both of them. The gentle sigh of the waves daintily lapping the stones, and the call of the sea-birds overhead, were all the sounds they heard, except the occasional distant boom of a gun, which still sent a little pang through Molly’s tender heart. But she thought of the coastguard’s cottage, and all the time that was to be passed before she could be polishing its floors and windows for Harold melted away before that vision of happiness, which stood out like a distant peak when all the nearer hills and vales are hidden in a morning mist.

So they lay there in the boat, waiting for the falcon to appear, for it was hopeless to try and discover the nest until one of the old birds should return to it with food for the young. Every now and then Molly’s rosy mouth opened to receive a bit of bread and cheese, offered it on the point of Harold’s clasp-knife, which his coastguard friend had given him; but at last there was no more, and lulled by the gentle motion of the boat, she fell into a peaceful doze. She awoke, feeling Harold’s hand on her mouth.

“Don’t speak, Molly,” he whispered; “look there! That’s the wicked thing that killed your Snowdrop.”

She looked up and saw a large bird hovering just at the edge of the cliffs above them. Its great wings were spread out, as it sailed round and round for a while, looking to see that the coast was clear: and their sharp eyes could see that it carried something in its talons. Then, seeing nothing to disturb its solitude, it wheeled slowly down the cliff, and perched on a projecting bit of rock, not very high above their heads, and stood there, proud and fierce, with one foot still grasping its victim, which they could now see was a young leveret, bleeding and struggling in its last agony. When the last struggle was over, and not before, the sharp, cruel, beak was driven like a knife into the leveret’s neck, and the fur torn from its back; and when the butcher’s work was complete, the great bird slowly rose on its wings, and sailed into the air once more with the bleeding victim.

Harold slowly changed his position in the boat, and watched the falcon closely and silently. Wheeling once or twice, as it rose against the cliff, and uttering a chattering cry as if to announce its coming to its young ones, it passed within a narrow cleft in the rock, about a third of the way down the precipice, and disappeared. The boy was on his feet in an instant, and, springing out of the boat, he took off his blue jersey, and threw it to Molly to take care of; then he took a long look at the rocks above him, and rapidly made up his mind as to the line he would take in climbing. The first part was easy enough; but at the height of about a hundred feet from the sea the rocks suddenly became steeper. Still there was nothing to prevent an active lad from scaling them, if the hold for hand and foot were only firm; but the red rock was sometimes loose and brittle, and would need great care in handling. If he could pass safely along the face of these higher rocks by a little ledge which gave room for a few rock-loving plants to grow, he would reach the cleft into which the falcon had disappeared; once there, he must trust to luck, for he could not see further from below.

He quickly passed up the lower and more broken part of the cliff, Molly watching the easy motion of his supple form with pride and confidence. No shade of anxiety for him crossed her mind; she had often seen him climb both rocks and trees before, and had even sometimes climbed with him. She too was strong and active, and knew the delight of swinging herself from rock to rock or from bough to bough, with the perfect confidence that young heads place in the resources of their hands and feet. She would have been quite willing to dare even these cliffs with him, if he had asked her; but Harold knew very well that this would be the roughest climb he had ever yet tried, and had all the morning spoken as if he were going alone; so Molly quietly acquiesced, as she always did on such occasions. She sat in the boat, her hands playing with her blue worsted cap, but her eyes intently fixed on the climber.

When he reached the steeper rocks, he went more slowly; and she could see him testing the firmness of his foothold by a kick, or loosening a stone with his hand, which went leaping downwards and fell into the sea with a splash, almost too near the boat to be pleasant. Once or twice he picked up the egg of some Guillemot or Gull which had flown off as he approached, and held it out for Molly to see; and once he stopped to examine the skin of the leveret which the falcon had left behind on the projecting bit of rock. At last he safely reached the ledge, and began to walk carefully along it, steadying himself against the rock above him with his right hand. Just before he reached the cleft to which the ledge was leading him, Molly saw the falcon sail out of it again within a few yards of him; but Harold stood perfectly motionless in the shadow of the rock, and the magnificent bird, too busy to search for intruders, failed to see him, and rising slowly, passed over the beetling brow of the cliff and disappeared inland.

Then he went on again slowly, to the corner where the ledge passed into the cleft and out of Molly’s sight: and now she first began to wonder whether he would after all be able to reach the nest. The corner projected sharply, and in rounding it, the ledge seemed almost to come to an end; no grass grew on it at that point, and the rocks above and below were cut sharply and steeply. She saw him stop for a minute or two when he came to this corner, and put his foot forward to try the footing; her blue cap dropped out of her hands into the boat, and she sat up gazing with eager eyes and parted lips. Then she saw him rest his left foot on the jutting bit of rock he had tested, kneel down on his right knee, and slowly work himself along with the help of his hands. As he turned the corner, he seemed to get into easier quarters, for he rose to his feet again, and passed in a moment out of her sight into the dark cleft.

A few minutes later she heard the cries of the young falcons, and a loud shout from Harold told her that vengeance was being done for Snowdrop’s death. Sticks and rubbish began to fall down the rocks; he was razing to the ground the falcon’s rockbuilt refuge. And then he emerged again, with a young bird in his hand, which he proceeded to tie up in his pocket-handkerchief, and button inside the breast of his shirt. When all was ready, he again knelt down, this time with his left knee, using his right foot to support him below wherever it could find a firm support. Molly watched her hero now impatiently; she wanted him to come down quickly and show her the young falcon.

The difficult part was almost over, when some bit of stone on which he had rested his right foot gave away, and rolled down the precipice. He had nothing now to hold by except his left knee, and Molly, now standing up in the boat in real anxiety, saw him keeping his balance with difficulty by pressing his unsupported leg hard against the rocks. Then she saw him make a spring—such a spring indeed as one can make with nothing to spring from but one’s left knee—and try to catch at a big red knob which lay just at the end of the perilous part of the ledge. His hands caught the knob, and he turned with his face to the rock struggling to bring his feet up once more to the level of the ledge. But the stone was treacherous and gave way, and the boy, after another moment’s effort to save himself, fell after it down the steeper part of the rocks, till he was caught by another ledge below, and there lay quite still.

Molly uttered an inarticulate sound as she saw him fall; she did not cry or scream, but she trembled all over. A cold feeling went down her back, and her heart beat so violently that for a moment she was obliged to sit down panting. She looked all round to see if any boat was in sight, but the fishermen did not often come so far at that time of the year, and the sea was unbroken by an oar. Only far out in the offing lay the huge form of the ironclad; and for an instant there flashed through Molly’s mind the picture of Harold in his young strength sitting opposite her with his oars, turning to watch the firing of the big guns, then holding her face in his hands, and bidding her not be silly. Something told her that now an effort was needed from her, such as she had never had to make in her life before; and, strong and healthy as she was, she felt her faintness passing, and her will growing strong. She was quite alone; she must act; what should she do?

At first she thought of rowing back for help, but she knew that the tide had not yet turned, and that she would be a much longer time getting back than they had taken in coming. And then she would have to leave Harold all that time, and he perhaps dying, or at least badly hurt. He might indeed be dead; but at none of these possibilities did she quail again, now that she had fully nerved herself for action. She must climb and reach him; and she set about it instantly. With a woman’s instinct she took what was left of the cold tea that they had brought with them, tied Harold’s blue jersey round her neck by the sleeves, stepped firmly out of the boat, and after marking the spot where he fell, began to climb.

Once at the top of the easier rocks, she found herself not far below the shelf upon which he must be lying, and called to him. No answer came. Panting with effort and excitement, but with firm limbs and steady head, she began to ascend the steeper rocks, and presently reached what seemed to be a faint track, made perhaps by some animal, which led her easily upwards to the shelf. When she reached it her strength failed for a moment, and her eyes seemed dim; but mastering herself again she advanced, and suddenly came upon Harold, lying on his back in a little bed of rough grass and samphire. She saw in an instant that he was alive, and spoke to him, but he did not answer. Then she knelt down beside him, folded up the jersey and put it under his head; opened the bottle of cold tea, and moistening her fingers with it, rubbed his temples and wetted his nostrils. She gave his forehead one kiss; but there was work to be done, and this was no time for kisses: she felt half ashamed even of this one. She searched for wounds, but could find none; only she feared that one arm on which he was lying must be badly hurt. But she could not move him, and must wait till he came to himself; and she went on rubbing and chafing, yet sparing the tea till he should wake and be able to drink some. It was quite an hour before he came to himself.

At last his eyes opened slowly, and his lips moved a little, but without a sound. She held the bottle to them, and he swallowed a little of the tea; then the eyes closed again, and he seemed to sleep. Presently she saw a fisherman’s boat passing at some distance from the shore. She stood up, waved her handkerchief and shouted; but the boat was too far off, and she was neither heard nor seen.

Her shouting woke Harold again, and in a faint voice he said, “What’s the matter, Molly?” and then, after a pause, “Where’s the young falcon?”

She looked in his shirt; the handkerchief was still there, and the young bird was in it, though dead. “Here it is, Harold,” she said; “and now you must try and get up and come down with me to the boat, and I’ll row you home and take care of you till you’re all right again.”

“Dear old Molly,” was all that Harold answered; but they were words that Molly never forgot.

He tried to get up, but the pain in his arm was so great that he fainted away again; and Molly had to sit, now silent and sad, and watch for some boat coming round the headland, chafing his temples from time to time with fingers as gentle as a lady’s. When he came to himself once more, it was getting towards evening; the sea was cold and gray, and the mist began to creep again around the cliffs. Molly had been thinking of what was to be done; her mind seemed stronger and clearer than it had ever been before, and she spoke to Harold firmly, like a mother talking to her little boy.

“Harold dear, I must leave you and go and get help; you will die of cold if we have to stay out all night. But first I must make you as comfortable as I can. Which pocket is your knife in?”

He told her, and she succeeded in getting it out without hurting him. Then she took the jersey from under his head, cut off the sleeve that belonged to the injured arm, and contrived to slip the warm garment over his body and right arm; took off her own jersey, and laid it under his head, gave him a kiss and stroked his fair hair, and told him to lie still and go to sleep, and she would be back soon. And then she started down the rocks, marking her way carefully that she might recollect it when she returned, and stepping into the boat, pulled westwards as fast as she could. The sun was setting when she reached the village.

Her news spread like wildfire. Her father borrowed a horse, and rode off to the nearest town for a doctor; her mother put on her bonnet and went to break the news to Harold’s mother. By the time Molly, still steady of purpose though stiff and tired, had eaten such a meal as she could get down, and put up some more provisions and some brandy for Harold, four stalwart fishermen were ready with a big boat and lanterns, and were waiting for her on the beach. Tired as she was, Molly would have liked to have taken an oar, and even asked to be allowed to do so. She could not bear to be doing nothing; she was in a state of restless activity and energy. One of the men laughed, and bade her lie down in the boat and go to sleep. But an older man, who saw her dark eyes sparkling in the moonlight with a strange wildness, did Molly a good turn.

“Give her the tiller, Dick,” he said: “don’t you see the lass must be at something? Come, Molly, lass, steer us straight, and tell us all about you and the lad.”

So Molly took the helm, and went over the story with them again, and kind old Martin kept asking her to describe this or that once more and once again, and they pulled so strongly and quickly that they were at the Red Cliffs long before she expected. Then she asked them to shout, and held her hands to her ears in hopes of catching an answer from the cliff, and after the second shout there came a feeble answer.

She led the way up the rocks in the moonlight. They found Harold very cold and in pain; but the brandy soon revived him, and he even contrived to eat a little.

“Dear old Molly,” he said once more. And Molly kissed him again, and stepped downwards with the lantern, to show them the best places for their feet, while they lifted the boy, groaning sadly with pain, laid his injured arm over his chest, and began to carry him slowly down the rocks. She guided them safely down, though the work took a long time, and was perilous for men who could not use their hands, and terribly painful for Harold: but it was over at last, and he was laid safely in the bottom of the boat, and made as comfortable as possible with the rugs and pillows which Molly’s mother had provided. Molly sat in the stern again holding the tiller; but she soon began to droop over it now the tension was taken off her, and in a few minutes was fast asleep. Old Martin took the tiller from her hand, laid her down by Harold, and covered her with his own rough pilot-coat. When they reached the village, where the beach was crowded with eager faces, and lanterns were moving about here and there, he took her in his arms and carried her to her mother’s cottage.

“That’s a rare lass of yours,” he said, “and I never would have thought it of her. They two must make up together one of these days; and a fine pair they’ll be! Good-night, ma’am.”

Molly was put to bed, and slept an unbroken sleep till late in the morning. When she woke she was so stiff and tired that she could hardly turn round; but when she did so, she saw the two mothers, her own and Harold’s, standing by the bedside. The latter kissed her many times on the forehead, and told her how Harold had slept well and was now wide awake, and asking for her; and how he had sent her another pigeon, even more beautiful than the last.

“But, Molly,” she went on, “the doctor says his spine is injured as well as his arm, and he won’t be able to go into the Navy. He’s terrible vexed about it, poor lad.”

Molly sprang out of bed, in spite of her stiffness. She felt a real and lively pity for Harold, and she must go to him at once. All her childishness was gone; if she could have seen Harold that moment in his sailor’s dress, marching off to Portsmouth, she would have jumped for joy. There was work still left for her to do; she must comfort Harold.

The case was more serious than the doctor at first supposed. Harold had before long to be taken away to a London hospital, where he could get the benefit of constant attendance and all kinds of appliances. His mother went with him, and took up her abode in London, in the house of one of Harold’s uncles, who was a small dealer there, and Harold slowly recovered his strength, was apprenticed to a carpenter, learnt his trade with a good will, and began to make a start in life. It was full four years before Harold and Molly met again.

When at last he came to pay a visit to the old fishing-village, he found Molly a tall, strong and sensible-looking maiden of eighteen. It was she who proposed a row to the Red Cliffs, to see the scene of their adventure four years ago; and it was she who rowed this time, while he sat in the stern and steered. But it was he who, on their homeward way, just before they rounded the last headland into the little harbour, let go the tiller, took her brown face between his hands, and said once more,

“Dear old Molly!”

And they plighted their loves as the old thatched cottages came in sight under the curving embrace of the down.

A DEBATE IN AN ORCHARD.

It was one of those midsummer evenings which to the discontented seem almost too long. In the orchard the old birds had finished finding the young ones their supper, and the long labours of the day were over. The swifts were flying, and screaming with delight as they flew, round the old church tower, and the swallows were gliding less noisily in and out of the long shadows of the apple-trees; but most of the dwellers in the orchard had taken a quiet perch, and were singing, or dallying in some pleasant way with the last half-hour of daylight, until it should be time to go to roost.

A blackbird, a robin, a sparrow, and a blue titmouse found themselves together on a single tree. They were old acquaintances, for they had lived together in the orchard and garden the whole winter; friends, in the proper sense of the word, they were not, for they differed a good deal in their opinions, and had quarrelled nearly every day in the winter over the crumbs which had been put for them outside the farmhouse windows. But they contrived to put up with one another, and had been so busy with their young of late, that all ill-feeling had passed away from their minds.

“Well,” said the sparrow, “here we are again. Upon my word I wish the sun would set; there’s nothing more to do.”

“Why don’t you sing?” said the robin.

“That’s a stale joke,” was the answer. “And your song is getting stale too, Mr. Robin; you’ll have to leave it off a bit soon.”

“One should not sing too much,” observed the blackbird. “I wonder you robins don’t get tired of hearing yourselves. It’s too hot to sing this evening: spring is the time for that. Let us do something else to amuse ourselves.”

“Let us see who can hang from a bough best with his head downwards,” said the blue tit; and he instantly performed the feat with great agility. The sparrow, being in want of something to do, tried to imitate him, but he couldn’t do it a bit, and made himself ridiculous.

“What a lubberly creature!” said a swallow, who had paused in her flight through the orchard to rest for a moment at the end of a dead bough of the same tree. “Are you so hard up for something to do? Why don’t you have a debate? There was a debate going on in my barn the other evening, and very amusing it was. Old Squire Wilmot was in the chair. He told the men and boys that they were going to have a debate once a month to sharpen their wits, and—”

(“That’ll take a long time,” put in the blue tit.)

“And the young squire was going to propose a motion himself that night.”

“What do you think it was about? Bird’s-nesting! He said it was cruel, I believe; and some one else said it wasn’t; and there they were chattering away all the evening. But I had young to attend to, and of course I couldn’t listen, even if it had been worth while. Why don’t you have a debate? I dare say you wouldn’t talk quite such nonsense. Good evening.” And off she went, without waiting for an answer.

“That’s not a bad idea,” said the blue tit; “only I don’t much care to imitate Man. What a lumbering animal it is! However, if we are to have a debate, why not debate about him? We shall all have something to say on that subject, anyhow.”

“Very well,” said the Robin, who had a way of taking things into his own hands, “very well, we will discuss Man. But first we must elect a president. I am willing to be president, if you like. Our family has encouraged Man for many centuries, and we ought to know something about him by this time!”

There was silence for a minute. The Robin was not so popular in the orchard as to be elected at once by acclamation. At this moment the Swallow returned to her twig, just to see how they were getting on, and was informed of the difficulty.

“Oh, by all means elect Robin,” said she; “they always elect some respectable person president. They like some one who looks better than he talks. Presidents don’t make speeches as a rule; they sit and look grand, like the beadle in the church where I nested last summer. And now I think of it,” she added, “that beadle had a red waistcoat just like Bobby’s; so he had.”

And off she went again.

“Bother that bird,” said the Robin; “she’s like a wild-rose bush, all prickles and no caterpillars. I won’t be president if I am not to be allowed to speak. Let the Blackbird preside; it would just suit his capacity.”

“I don’t pretend to be better than I am,” said the Blackbird in his mellowest tones; “but we had better vote at once, it will soon be dark. Each of you imitate the voice of the bird you wish to elect. All the birds in the orchard shall be welcome and eligible: Starling, Nuthatch, Creeper, Wren, Flycatcher, Chaffinch. Now then, one, two, three——”

A variety of strange sounds were heard, so strange and discordant that the farmer’s wife looked out at her back-door to see what could be going forward. But while it was still going on, there was heard at the top of all the din the clear shrill song of a Wren from a heap of old sticks by the wall.

“The very bird for you,” said the Swallow, alighting once more on her twig. “He’ll only have to turn on his loudest song to stop the speakers if they get tiresome or lose their tempers. He’ll be like the organ in that church I was telling you of; it was put there to prevent the singers being heard, and it did its business very well. Yes, yes, elect the Wren; he’s small, but he’s afraid of no one. And in some countries they call him king.”

She flew to the heap of sticks, and returned with the Wren, who took his station on a prominent bough, cocked his tail very high, and sang his very loudest.

“That will do capitally,” said the Swallow. “Turn on that whenever they make fools of themselves, and you’ll have the debate to yourself after all.”

And she was gone again, leaving them another pleasant little keepsake. But they were too eager for the debate to begin, to mind much what she said, and they all consented to accept the Wren as president.

“I appoint the Blackbird to open the debate,” said the Wren, who had been duly instructed in his duties by the Swallow. “Let the Blackbird state what motion he will propose.”

“I will propose,” replied the Blackbird, “that too close an association with Man is degrading to the race of birds.”

“I won’t speak on that motion,” said the Robin, “I consider it personal.”

“So do I,” said the Sparrow; “grossly personal and insulting.”

“What’s insulting?” said the Swallow, who was back again for the fourth time. “Oh, most insulting to birds who use men’s buildings for their nests! Look at me and the Sparrows, see how refined and elevated we have become through ages of association with man! One doesn’t like to talk of one’s self, but I put it to you whether the Sparrow’s charming, fairy-like grace, dainty appetite, and chastely brilliant colouring, can well be ascribed to any other cause? But dear me, I never meant to make a speech. Good-bye; don’t quarrel, and, above all, don’t be sarcastic; it’s a habit I abhor.” And she glided away once more.

“That’s one for you, Philip,” said the mischievous Blue-Tit to the Sparrow. “Let her have it back again next time, my dear boy; have a repartee ready. Make haste, you have no time to lose.”