Chapter II: Other Comrades of the Road (1)

THE PINE GROVE PATH

Our festal day was yet so young,
As through the pines I came to you,
The level sunrise lightly flung
Before my feet, O eager feet,
A flickering path of flame to you.

The purple finches, breakfasting
On pinecone seeds, in charity
Tossed down the silky scales, to bring
My human heart, O singing heart,
A share of their hilarity.

But gladder than those revelers
So raspberry red, I sped to you,
Beyond the pines, beyond the firs,
A birthday guest, O blissful guest
To tread the path that led to you.

ROBIN HOOD

"The little bird with the red breast, which for his great
familiarity with men they call a Robin, if he meet any one on the
woods to go astray, and to wander he knows not whither out of his
way, of common charitie will take upon him to guide him, at least
out of the woods, if he will but follow him, as some think. This I
am sure of, it is a comfortable and sweet companion."

--_Partheneia Sacra_. By "H. A." 1533.

The early history of Robin Hood, like that of too many illustrious characters, is veiled in obscurity. I never knew his parents nor was I ever on speaking terms with any other member of his family. I cannot tell whether his nursery was set in an apple tree or elm or oak or pine, nor whether it was wind or boy or other untoward circumstance of nestling life that cast his helpless infancy adrift upon the world. Our earliest knowledge of Robin Hood dates from Sunday morning, June 16, 1901, when a group of Wellesley children, demurely wending their way to Sunday School across a bit of open green, heard chirps in the grass and picked up a baby robin, cold, hungry, bedraggled, pecked and generally forlorn. They took him to Sunday School, muffling him in a spick-and-span small handkerchief when his cries became too shrill and, after this vain attempt at spiritual comfort, gave him to one of their mammas, who, for several days, managed to sustain him on experimental diets. Thursday morning, being about to make her summer exodus, she cheerfully transferred her fosterling to me. Her farewell attention, a spoonful of milk poured down his yawning throat, nearly ended his adventures on the spot. He turned up his eyes, gasped and stiffened, but with admirable presence of mind she balanced him on his bill, gave him a dexterous tap in the crop and wiped up the milk from the table, while Robin, blinking ruefully, resigned himself to a nap in my pocket. He woke before we reached home, however, and demanded luncheon so imperiously that I called at the nearest house and begged for bread. At the drug store I paused again for water and, to make better connection between this fluid and the depths of that bright orange cavity which Robin so confidingly opened, I bought a medicine-dropper, but soon found that a finger-tip would do as well.

Owing to these attentions by the way, Robin Hood was in an agreeable and sociable frame of mind when he first met his adopted family, yet all his baby graces gained for him only a mocking reception. He was such a dumpy, speckle-breasted fluff, with funny folding legs that could not hold him up on the perch, no tail and an utterly disproportionate amount of bill, that it was impossible to take him seriously, but his trustful little heart never once suspected that we were making fun of him. He cuddled down cosily on an improvised couch in the corner of a canary cage and devoted himself to a steady alternation of snoozes and gorges. Everybody laughed at him--the Dryad, who declared him a little monster of greediness and bad manners; the chipmunks, who peered curiously into his cage whenever we left it for sun and air on the piazza; even Joy-of-Life, who promptly sallied out with a long iron spoon to dig him worms. For Robin Hood would keep on ringing his dinner-bell, so to speak, even while the moistened bits of bread were being thrust down his vociferous throat, ceasing from that hungry clamor only when he was stuffed to the point of suffocation. Then, with a ridiculous little grunt, he would topple off the supporting hand back to his trundle-bed and doze like a dormouse only to awake, in half an hour or so, an utterly famished birdling, all one yellow gape of tremulous eagerness and outcry.

At this stage of development, living to eat, and eating to sleep, Robin was left for several days in the care of Dame Gentle, kindest of neighbors, pending the absence of his foster family. Here he was petted to his babyhood's content and soon evinced a docile, affectionate disposition. He took a dislike to his cramped canary cage, but now he was strong enough to perch, and once placed on a chair rung by a hand he trusted, he would sit quiet from one feeding time to the next, or until he heard a familiar voice or step. Then, floppity-flop, down to the floor would tumble Robin and hop joyously to meet his friend. He soon had a soft, crooning little note for Dame Gentle, and all the summer long, while he became a general chatterbox, kept a peculiarly confidential accent and manner for her.

We resumed our charge on the third of July, but on the Fourth our attention was somewhat diverted from Robin by the gift of a baby vireo, apparently wounded by a fall from the nest. This green jewel, wild as a windy leaf at first, was soon tamed, but his diet proved a difficult problem. Robin Hood was only too ready to eat anything and everything, but the tiny vireo, though calling piteously for food, turned his bill away in sore disappointment from our various offerings. He would not touch the crumbs of softened bread, nor Robin's favorite mess of mashed potato and hard-boiled egg-yolk. We consulted all our bird-books, and when we learned that the case demanded "masticated insects," we sat down and looked at each other in despair. I generously offered to catch any number of insects, if Joy-of-Life would do the masticating, but little Liberty Bell finally compromised on a masticated raspberry. The next day, mocking-bird food was procured for him, and this he swallowed with apparent relish, but still he did not thrive.

On Sunday, the seventh, an eager troop of children brought to our door another fallen vireo, this wee waif seeming in worse state than the other. We named him Church Bell and cherished him as tenderly as our ignorance might, but I hope Cornelia never had half the trouble with her jewels that our pair of emeralds gave us. Their sharp, incessant, querulous pipe, the utterance of pains we could not soothe, was so trying to the nerves that, when I heard Joy-of-Life dropping books, I would transfer the nest from her desk to mine, and when Mary came up with a message from the grocer to find me spilling ink, she would take the vireos down to her ironing board and drown their plaints by her lusty voice of song. They were exquisite little creatures to see, and as trustful with us as was Robin himself, but we never had the key to their mystery. They would cry even in sleep and had hours of violent trembling. We would sometimes put them in the rough, outdoor cage which had been built for Robin, a large, square, unfloored box with roof and walls of woven wire. He looked big and lubberly beside them, like Puck beside Oberon and Titania, but he was always good-natured with his dainty guests and often tried to join in the conversation as they sat, pressed close together, on the far end of the twig which served him for a perch, lamenting like elfin Banshees. A touch of chilly weather ended their brief tragedy. Liberty Bell was hushed forever in the dawn of Tuesday, the ninth, and by Wednesday noon Church Bell lay silent beside him in the rockery which was already the burial cairn of three beloved chickens, Microbe, Pat and Cluxley.

Meanwhile Robin Hood had been causing his share of anxiety. The birdlings were all so tame that, in feeding them, we used to throw back that half of the cage-top which served as lid, whereupon they would fly up to the edge of the box and sit there in a row for dinner. Occasionally one of the vireos would flash up into a low tree and wail for food until we had to bring the step-ladder and fetch him down. But it was not until Robin's winglets were fairly grown that he seemed aware of the existence of trees. Then, suddenly, one azure afternoon, he glanced up, cocked his head, spread his untried Icarus-plumes and was off. In instant consternation, the whole family trooped after him, so far as groundlings could, while he flew from tree to tree and roof to roof. Chirping in his affectionate fashion, he peeped down upon us with evident surprise as if to ask, "Why don't you come, too? It's much nicer up here." Innocent of mirrors, he probably thought that we looked just like him, or that he looked just like us, and he could not understand why we chose to be earth-gropers when the leafy branches swayed so delectably in mid-air. But he was such a social and kindly little bird that, on our repeated calls, he came dipping down to us and, without protest of a feather, let himself be shut into his cage again.

Now we were face to face with the question that had already cast its shadow before. Should we make a life-long captive of our Robin, who took so pleasantly to human ways, or should we give him the perils and delights of liberty? Mary's eyes were very wistful, and Joy-of-Life and I reiterated to each other that our house-reared bird would be handicapped in the greenwood struggle for life, that he was necessarily weaker and less wary than other young robins, that there were white kittens next door, that a gaunt, gray hunting-cat had been seen lurking about the wire box--and yet, all the while, we knew what we must do.

"He who bends to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise."

And so, on the following day, whenever any of us were at leisure to guard our artless adventurer from the dangers of the yard, we set the cage-lid wide and let him go where he would. He made small use of his privileges at first. Little runs on the lawn amused him for a while, but he would soon mount to the piazza rail and tease the occupant of the steamer chair for food and petting. His hops over the shelving rock behind the house were feeble; his trips of exploration to the neighboring trees and roofs were brief. He was hardly more than a baby robin yet and, soon wearied, he would go back into his cage for a nap on the familiar perch. An old maternal robin showed much interest in this lonely, weak-legged youngster, who seemed so unthrifty about picking up ants for himself, but he squealed with fright and flew to us whenever she approached him. She would stand silently beside the cage and study him through the wire while he slept, but whether she was the matron of a robin-home for crippled children, or one of his kinsfolk puzzling out a likeness, our bewildered fosterling, whose idea of mother-birds was formed on Dame Gentle and ourselves, would have, from first to last, nothing to do with her.

But one evening, July 7th, just as we had finished giving Robin Hood a particularly good supper on the edge of his box, he suddenly soared and left us. The house stands

"About a young bird's flutter from a wood,"

and, to our dismay, Robin Hood made thitherward as if it were Sherwood Forest, disappeared among the dusky treetops and returned not a chirp to all our agitated calling. He had not passed a night out of doors for the three weeks that he had been under human guardianship, and we felt that anything from a fatal chill to a fatal hawk might befall him. But the first sound that greeted my waking senses in the morning was Mary's delighted, rich-toned, "Why, Robby!" and there, on top of his cage, sat a hungry, happy little bird, chirping eagerly and gesticulating with one wing in a funny fashion of his own, peculiar to seasons of excitement.

Mary--be it said in passing--was Cecilia's predecessor and for several years, at the outset of our housekeeping, gave us a devotion only surpassed by her devotion to her own large and lively family. They lived but a few miles away, in the Boston suburb known as Jamaica Plain, and Mary was subject to violent attacks of homesickness, especially at Christmas, Easter, Hallowe'en and Thanksgiving, so that we were usually deprived of her services when we needed them most. Once at home, she would feast and frolic until she had made herself just sick enough to have a pathetic pretext for prolonging her absence day after day. When she turned up at last, her Irish wit would inevitably forestall and frustrate any little unpleasantness that might be awaiting her. I had mentioned at table one evening, while Mary was changing the courses, that, lunching with our college president that day, I had enjoyed luscious grapefruit fresh from the West Indies, "brought her by a private hand from Jamaica." From her next truancy Mary returned with a bulging paper bag in her arms, which, even while my lips were parting to utter a deeply meditated reproach, she dumped upon me with her rosy cheeks aglow and her round blue eyes all twinkles. "Here's grapefruit for yez, brought by a private hand from Jamaica--Plain." The family, waiting about gleefully to hear me deliver that purposed scolding, broke into a shout of laughter, and the honors of the day rested, as always, with the culprit.

During one of these vacations, intolerably prolonged by excuse after excuse, our patience gave way and we availed ourselves of a sudden chance to put in her place, as temporary substitute, a highly competent (and expensive) Scandinavian woman. Thus we entered upon a month of unparalleled luxury, for Gunilla proved to be a cook of the first order. We were quite below her standard of household opulence and elegance, as we realized when she asked us, with her invariable bearing of respectful dignity, if we would kindly tell her where our wine cellar was located, but she was disposed to take a rest between great houses and provided for our simple needs with indulgent efficiency as long as her whim lasted. Although she had broiled and roasted for a governor, a bishop, and various magnates of industry, she turned to scrubbing for recreation as naturally as czars and kaisers turn to chopping wood. She beat every particle of dust, after sweeping, out of broom and whisk, and before hanging out the clothes, she scoured the line and every astonished clothespin. The sheets and other flat pieces sent home from the laundry she straightway plunged into her own tubs. Her pantry shone with obtrusive cleanliness and every dish came glistening to the stiff, high-lustered table-cloth, where her spiced breadsticks were cradled in fresh napkins for each dinner. Her kitchen range fairly dazzled the eye with its sable brightness, and we were so proud of the toothsome concoctions that came crackling and crinkling from it as to give, under her smiling encouragement, a ruinous series of banquets to our campus friends.

Promptly on Gunilla's departure, Mary came charging back to us, fired with jealous wrath. Indeed, she would talk of little else but the enormities of extravagance committed by "The Gorilla," until Robin Hood's advent effected a welcome diversion.

For the week following his first venture into the trees Robin grew braver and stronger every day. He had no feathered acquaintance and kept close at home, hopping about under the rosebushes with a comical air of proprietorship, bathing in an old flower-pot saucer in his open cage and sitting sociably, for hours at a time, on Joy-of-Life's window ledge or Mary's, or on my window box for winter birds. He could feed himself by this time, but he still liked better to be fed. His table manners showed marked improvement from his "little monster" age. He no longer guzzled, and was becoming quite capable of picking up his own living. Sometimes, when the ants were abundant, he would try the experiment of self-support for half an afternoon. He was still a very guileless birdling, and would fall sound asleep squatted down on any sunny shelf of rock or even in the middle of a path, regardless of the prowling tabbies that had already made way with our stonewall colony of chipmunks. We encouraged him to frequent his safer haunts on roof and window box by keeping fresh water and plentiful supplies of mocking bird food ready for him there, but we had to know where he was from dawn to dark, although the July dawns seemed to come in the middle of the night. Morning after morning, not daring to trust our innocent even with the early worm, I would slip on dressing-gown and slippers and be out seeking him by three or four. And there, hopping across the already heated concrete, would come skurrying an enthusiastic little speckle-breast, flapping one wing in salutation and twittering indignantly, "Morning! Breakfast! Morning! Breakfast!" as if he had been up reading the newspaper for hours. He would ride trustfully on my hand into the house, take his food and drink, and then contentedly go to sleep again, perched, by preference, on top of a door.

But one Saturday morning I called Robin Hood in vain. The air, ringing with bird-carols, held no music so precious as his hungry chirp. Joy-of-Life was now a thousand miles away, but Mary and Dame Gentle joined anxiously in the search. We were a distracted household when, at eight, a ruddy young Audubon from the hilltop arrived, bringing in one hand our overjoyed little truant, and in the other another fledgling robin, with the merest beginnings of a tail--a waif picked up by the roadside. Audubon reported that, as he was busy in his garden, a young robin had flown down and alighted at his feet, fluttered there a moment and raised the nestling cry for food. Happy Robin Hood, to have chosen from all the boys of Wellesley the one wisest in benignant woodcraft! Audubon slipped quietly to the ground, caught a caterpillar and held it out to Robin, who came fearlessly to his hand and choked the furry delicacy down. Then Audubon was sure that this was our famed fosterling and, taking up the unsuspicious little fellow, hastened to bring him down the hill to his home.

The new arrival from the greenwood, whom we dubbed Friar Tuck, promptly belied that jovial memory. He was a wild, sullen, desperate little outlaw, whose chirp was a metallic click and whose bill had to be pried open before he would eat. Not even Robin Hood's hospitable chatter could dispel his scared, defiant misery, and on the second morning, unable to bear the look he turned up to the trees, we lifted the cage lid and let him fly. We never, to our knowledge, saw Friar Tuck again, and although we often listened for his uncanny chirp, it was not heard--not even by Mary, whose imagination so expanded under these Natural History studies that she would rush upstairs several times a day to report all manner of rainbow-colored fowl that she had discovered in the thickets. By the following winter, her Celtic vision had soared beyond all bounds. "The cherubs are shoveling snow off the porch of Paradise this morning," I once happened to remark, whereat Mary, plumping down the hot coffee-pot helter-skelter, sprang open-eyed and open-mouthed to the window, gazing ecstatically up into the white whirl of the storm. "I see thim! I see thim! The shining little dears! It's using their wings for shovels they are, and I see one of their feathers afloating down in the snow."

As the summer went on, Robin Hood became the pet of the neighborhood. Even Giant Bluff, who had moods of declaring that "what with 'Biddy-Biddy' on one side, and 'Robby-Robby' on the other, this hill ain't fit for nothin' but females to live on," would bring tidbits to our Speckle, who soon saved him the trouble by making frequent calls at the front door. A guest of that house used to come to her window in the early morning and sing him "Robin Adair," while he stood on the opposite roof attentively listening, his head cocked and his bright eye turned on the serenader.

But he was a loyal little soul. He spent much of his time on Dame Gentle's piazza, and although Joy-of-Life, just before her departure, treating him for asthma--due, the sages said, to an overhearty diet in his inactive babyhood--had popped an unhappy worm dipped in red pepper down his throat, yet even this Robin could forgive. It had hurt his feelings at the time. He had withdrawn to his best-beloved branch on his best-beloved oak and maintained an offended silence for half an hour, but with the sting his anger went, and for days after Joy-of-Life's disappearance, Robin would fly up to her window ledge and chirp to the closed blinds.

During this second week of freedom, his experience was enlarged by a thunderstorm, which he contemplated with lively astonishment from within my window, but the next morning worms were plentiful, and there, to Giant Bluff's inordinate pride, was Robin trotting about the lawn like an old hand, turning up bits of turf with a grubby little bill and actually getting his own breakfast.

A day or two later our fledgling began to sow wild oats. Thursday afternoon Mary missed him and, hunting for him beyond the cairn, which she designated "The Pets' Cemetery," found him lending charmed attention to a big, red-breasted robin, who dashed off so guiltily that he bumped himself against the fence. All Friday our Speckle was shy and wild, flying about the edge of the wood with this first friend of his own feather, but he came to perch on the piazza rail at twilight, as usual, keeping us company while we took our open-air dinner, and responding to our blandishments with a drowsy chirp. When he soared to choose his slumber-spray in one of the tall trees before the house, we strained our eyes to follow him into the shadows and called up laughing counsels and good-nights as long as he would answer. But the next morning an evil-eyed black cat sat on our steps and, hour after hour, no Robin Hood appeared. Mary spent most of the forenoon in the woods and, after luncheon, we both went calling through a leafy world with a Babel of chirps about us. "Thim birds, they're just a-mocking me," wailed Mary. But suddenly we both heard, hurrying along the air, that dear, unmistakable baby squawk, and in an instant more our own little Speckle came plumping down on my head, where he rode triumphantly into the house, flapping his funny right wing all the way and gasping with speed and excitement. He had perhaps been in a fight, for one side of his guileless face was badly pecked. Throughout the afternoon he devoured one full meal after another, allowing ten-minute siesta intervals, with all the enthusiasm of a prodigal son, and then he must have a bath, and then he must be held and petted, and all the while--yep, yep, yep! flop, flop, flop!--he was trying to tell the story of his terrible adventures. Whatever they were, he was a reformed little robin, and spent the Sunday partly on my window box, where he would play for fifteen minutes together with the nutshells that the chickadees had emptied, and partly under a leafy canopy in the oak within easy squirrel-leap beyond, not having a chirp to chirp to any bad bird who would lead him into mischief.

For a fortnight longer Robin was our daily joy. It seemed to make us intimates of the woods to hear, as we were walking there, the hail of a familiar voice from overhead and look up to see our own small Speckle peeping down at us from some breezy twig against the blue. For he soon recovered from his penitence and went sailing through the trees on ever longer voyages of discovery, being often out of call for two or three hours at a time. But he was always on the window box, where no other robin ever came, in the early morning from half-past three on to seven, overflowing with conversation and insisting on intelligent replies to his remarks. At intervals throughout the day, too, I would hear a soft thud on the box, followed by a chirp-p-p and the flap-p-p of a very impatient and business-like little wing. On these occasions Robin Hood was quite too much occupied with his greenwood affairs to feed himself, and I must needs drop book or pen and cram refreshment down his importunate yellow gullet till it could hold no more. Then he would hop across to his Japanese water-cup, take a dozen eager dips, wipe his bill first on one side, then the other, on the edge of the box, and then, flapping his wing for good-by, sweep off again. In the middle of every forenoon and, during the hottest weather, of the afternoon as well, he alighted on his cage and called imperiously to Mary to bring him fresh water for his bath. We shut him in during this and during his sun-baths, since he enjoyed these rites so much as to be even more than commonly oblivious of cats.

On the evening of July 24 the mercury "dropped on us," as Mary said, some thirty degrees, and a drenching rain fell all night--a new experience for Robin Hood, who appeared at my window Thursday morning, a draggled little vagabond. Had there been no wise robin at hand to teach him how to take the oil from his back pockets and convert his airy fluff into a tight-fitting waterproof? He was glad to come in out of the wet and spent the forenoon in Mary's kitchen, letting her fondle him as she would, but flying with alarm from the proffered caresses of market-man and grocer-boy. In the course of the next few days, however, he began to protest a little when even his old friends stooped to take him up. He would hop backward, snapping his bill, but he seldom flew and, if the hand did not remain closed upon him, but left him perching free on wrist or finger, he was entirely content.

On August 8 we did our Robin wrong. An expected dinner guest had expressed a desire to see him and, as by this time he was spending his nights, presumably, in a far-off Robin roost, for which he sometimes started early in the afternoon, Mary caught him during the absorbed ecstasy of his sun-bath and shut him into the cage. This was still a favorite resort of his, and he did not object in the slightest until a young robin playmate with whom he was in the habit of flying to the roost whistled for him from a scarlet oak. Then Robin chirped to us to let him out, growing frantic with excitement as we, hitherto so prompt to obey his behests, made no move for his release. He called and called again, beating about the cage and even breaking into a song of wild entreaty. Shame-faced and conscience-stricken, we yet put him off, expecting our guest minute by minute. It was nearly seven when regrets were telephoned, but by that time Robin was in a panic and smote our hearts by the terror with which he fluttered back from us as we bent over the cage.

The instant the lid was raised he whirred up to the scarlet oak, where his faithful chum still waited, but before their belated departure Robin flew down to Dame Gentle's window and told her all about it, and then over to Giant Bluff's piazza, where he rehearsed his grievances again in a scolding chirp never heard from him before.

We closed the house on the fourteenth and went away, unforgiven by Robin Hood, who has never, so far as I know, come to human hand since Mary's clasp betrayed him to captivity. During those six days we caught flying glimpses of our estranged fosterling, easily recognized from a distance by the two white feathers in his tail, and a few times he started, by sheer force of habit, to hop across the road to us from Dame Gentle's, but, half-way over, he would turn sharply about, give an angry little yep, and hop back again.

When we reopened the house in late September, not even Dame Gentle had recent news of Robin Hood, and all the winter long we carried a sorrowful sense of broken friendship. We were anxious about our hand-reared birdling, too, hardly daring to hope that he could survive the perils of migration. What a desperate adventure it seemed!

"Who hath talked to the shy bird-people,
And counseled the feathered breast
To follow the sagging rain-wind
Over the purple crest?"

But on the sixth day of March Robin Hood came home. There had been a baby blizzard the night before and, as we returned from college in the early afternoon, I noticed birdtracks in the light snow that still mantled the piazza rail.

"See those prints, right where Robin Hood used to sit and watch us take our supper!" I exclaimed, a wild hope knocking at my heart, but Joy-of-Life thought it a case of hungry tree sparrows and, with her especial tenderness for the plucky, one-legged fox sparrow that had consorted with them all winter, went in to find them a choice handful of scraps. But when, a few minutes later, I entered my chamber, there outside his accustomed window, on the feeding-box now drifted over with snow, sat a great, plump, glossy redbreast, staring into the room with Robin's own bright eyes and cocking his head to listen to our welcome. He fluttered back to the nearest tree, when we opened the window, indicating that he had learned a thing or two, in the gossip of the long aerial journeys, about the human race, nor did he ever again enter the house nor let us touch him, but he kept close by, for weeks, perching in his old familiar places on roof and rail and window-ledge, hopping in our walks and gamboling in our eyes. Out in the open, he would come within a few inches of us and there take his stand and chirp the confidences that we would have given all our dictionaries to comprehend. He was such a tall, stately robin, with such an imposing air of travel and experience as he stood erect, swelling his bright breast with the effort to relate his Winter's Tale, that Joy-of-Life rechristened him Lord Bobs.

In course of time our gallant fledgling appeared in company with a mate, most disappointing to our romantic anticipation,--a faded crosspatch old enough to be his grandmother, a very shrew who scolded him outrageously whenever she saw him lingering beside us. She told him we were ogres, alligators, everything that was horrible and dangerous, and threatened to peck out his last pin-feather unless he flew away from us at once. A selfish old body she was, too, monopolizing the rock-bath, as if she were taking a cure for rheumatism, whole hours at a time, while Robin Hood, hot and dusty, waited on her pleasure in the drooping branches above. But despite her shrill remonstrances, he would still visit the window box, perching on Downy Woodpecker's marrow-bone for an opera stage and trilling his matins and vespers to our delighted ears. We were as proud of Robin Hood's singing as if we had taught him ourselves. Between his carols our troubadour would take a little refreshment, trying in turn Nuthatch's lump of suet, Bluejay's rinds of cheese, Junco's crumbs and his own mocking-bird food, or quaffing rain water from Chickadee's nutshell cups. He would sometimes hop to the sill and, close against the glass, watch all the doings in that world which lay about him in his infancy. We looked forward to an hour when he might bring his own little speckles to play, as he had loved to play, with the empty nutshells, but Mrs. Robin hustled him off to the woods for the nesting season and we were never able after that first spring to distinguish him with certainty among our robin callers. None the less he had made the summer and all summers happier for us by his gracious though guarded pardon for our unkindness.

"Truth never fails her servant, sir, nor leaves him
With the day's shame upon him,"

and even over wild-bird tradition and matrimonial tyranny the truth of our love for Robin Hood, its single lapse forgiven, had prevailed.

WHY THE SPIRE FELL

Our Emperor built a marble church
So holy never a bird might perch
On cross or crocket or gilded crown,
A fretted minster of far renown,
But still the spire came crashing down.

_They stoned the swallow and limed the lark;
A rosy throat was an easy mark;
The tiniest wren that built her nest
In Christ's own halo, on Mary's breast,
Was scared away like a demon guest._

Once, twice, thrice, the glistening spire
That soared from the central tower, higher
Than all its clustered pinnacles, fell,
And not one of the carven saints could tell
The cause, though the emperor quizzed them well.

Down in the cloister all strewn with chips
Of alabaster and ivory tips
Of pastoral staffs and angel wings,
In a rainbow ruin of sacred things
He held high court in the way of kings.

_All the while in a royal rage
He pelted with fragments of foliage,
Curly acanthus and vineleaf scroll,
Finial, dogtooth and aureole,
The linnets and finches who came to condole._

Crowned with a cobwebby cardinal's hat
That swooped from the vaulted roof like a bat,
On a tilted porphyry plinth for a throne,
The emperor summoned in thunder tone
The hallowed folk of metal and stone.

Martyrs, apostles, one and all,
Tiptoed down from the quaking wall;
Crusaders, uncrossing their legs of brass,
Sprang from their tombs; over crackle of glass
Balaam rode on a headless ass.

But not one of the sculptured cavalcade
Flocking from choir and creamy facade,
Deep-arched portal and pillared aisle
Had a word on his lips, though all the while
Gentle St. Francis was seen to smile.

_Whistles, chuckles, warbles tried
To give the answer the saints denied;
Gurgles, tinkles, twitters, trills,
Carols wild as wayward rills
Troubadouring daffodils._

St. Peter, high in his canopied niche
Set with jewels exceeding rich,
Was dancing a hornpipe over the clock,
But before the gargoyles had time to mock
From his shoulder crowed St. Peter's cock.

"_Kirikiree!_ Creative Love
That folds the emperor folds the dove.
No church is finished, though grand it be,
That lacks the beauty of charity.
Buttress your spire. _Kirikiree!_"

So our Emperor reared the spire anew,
Yon shaft of glory that cleaves the blue,
Held in its place by the lightest things
God ever fashioned, the wee, soft wings
Of the birds that join in our worshipings.

AN EASTER CHICK

"Only, what I feel is, that no charity at all can get rid of a
certain natural unkindness which I find in things themselves."

--Pater's _Marius the Epicurean_.

The grippe had held me a prostrate prisoner for weeks. Books, pencils, people were forbidden. It was a strange but not unhappy Lent to lie helpless day after day, gazing through my blessed square of window into a first snowy, then blowy, often rainy and rarely sunshiny patch of woodland, watching the brown oak leaves whirl in hurricane dances above the pine-tops, and the crows wing their strong flight against the gray of the sky. As a cumberer of the earth, I was meekly grateful for the least attention from this active outdoor world, for the cheery pipings of the chickadees, whose wee black bills pounded the marrow-bone on the window-sill, for the guttural greetings of the white-breasted nuthatches who played the acrobat on the swinging, open-work bag of cracked walnuts outside the pane, even for the jeers of the bluejays who swooped to the sash and dashed off like triumphant Dick Turpins with our bounty of bread and cheese.

So Joy-of-Life, hearing of a Boston confectioner's pious offer to bestow an Easter chicken on every customer who should alleviate the fast by the purchase of two pounds of expensive candies at any time during Holy Week, thought she would add to my feathered acquaintance a more intimate companion. Herself an abominator of sweets, she heroically passed a dollar and a half across the counter and received in exchange, beside two boxes of riotous living, a tiny chick, only a day or so out from egg and incubator.

It was pretty, she said, to see the interest with which the tired shop-girls bent over that fluffy morsel of life, petting it with light touches and soothing words, as it was tucked away, with Indian meal for provender and a wad of cotton-wool for bedding, in a gay pasteboard houselet. The color of this miniature mansion was russet flecked with black. The door was a painted sham, but the red-tiled roof swung open. The window boasted four oblong apertures, and the whole establishment was symmetrically set in a half-inch estate of the reddest pasteboard clay. The girl made the roof secure with a few turns of silver cord and the captive was reduced to thrusting an indignant yellow bill through one after another of his window openings, expostulating with all creation in a series of shrill chirps. As the customer stepped out with her premium in hand, the candy-coveting group of ragamuffins outside the window surged forward in rapture at sight and sound of the chicken, and one particularly grimy urchin reached up both arms toward it with such an imploring gesture that the birdling almost changed ownership then and there. But Joy-of-Life bethought herself in time of the conditions of tenement and alley, not favorable to the development of any sort of biped, and said:

"It is for a sick lady. Don't you want her to have it?"

And the tatterdemalion slowly dropped his wistful hands, sighing dutifully, "Yes, m'm."

The chicken-bearer's dignified progress, "cheep, cheep, cheep," across the Common and Public Gardens and through the Back Bay section, afforded her a new gauge for testing human nature. Colonial Dames who looked an aristocratic rebuke she put lower in the scale of sympathy than the Italian organ-grinder whose black eyes laughed frankly into hers, while the maid who opened a door in Newbury street, where Joy-of-Life had a call to make, fell with her shocked, contemptuous stare quite under passing rank.

It was late in the evening before I heard upon the stairs a welcome tread, mounting to that queer accompaniment of cheep, cheep, cheep, now pitched upon a key, had we but ears to hear, of acute distress. My delight in greeting the chicken was not reciprocated, and no wonder. Our unconscious, ignorant crimes against his frail little being had already begun. Joy-of-Life, ever most tender toward the weak, enjoyed, moreover, the advantage of having been reared upon a farm, where she had often watched the life of coop and poultry-yard, but not even she was wise enough to give that chicken comfort.

She had carefully seen to it, all the journey through, that he had oxygen enough. The March wind blew so harshly that she had wanted to shelter the fairy chalet under her cloak, but had feared that the yellow bill, forever thrusting itself through the small casement, would gasp for air. Air! That is the least of a chicken's wants. With all his baby energy, Microbe, as we promptly christened him, had called for heat, heat, heat, and had not been understood. Those thin pasteboard walls and that shred of cotton-wool had left him practically naked to the blast, and he was chilled--poor innocent--to the bone.

And still, in our big, human obtuseness, we did not comprehend. We brought him meal mixed with cold water--an atrocious diet from which he angrily turned away. All at cross purposes, we flattered him foolishly in our alien tongue, while he remonstrated passionately in his. At last the warmth of the room and very weariness quieted that incorrigible cheep a little, and he was put downstairs out of invalid hearing, with a strip of batting cast, like a snowdrift, over his jaunty dwelling.

The family went snugly to bed, while the furnace fire burned lower and lower and the chill of the small hours stole through the house. A less mettlesome chicken, overwhelmed with the loneliness and cruel cold, would have yielded up its accusing little ghost then and there, but this mite had a marvelous spirit of his own and struggled against fate like a De Wet.

In that heavy hour before the dawn, Joy-of-Life was roused from sleep by such desperate chicken shrieks, "Yep, yep, yep! Help, help, help!" that no doors could shut them out. Shivering in her dressing-gown she went down to our unhappy fosterling, who lay stiff and straight, with head thrust forward and legs stretched back, apparently _in articulo mortis_. The rigid bit of body was cold to her touch, and the only hopeful sign was that shrill, protesting chirp, into which all remaining vitality seemed to be forced. Holding the downy ball compassionately between her palms, this ineffectual giantess--from Microbe's point of view--reflected on the possibilities of the situation only to be baffled. The kitchen fire was out, the oven had not a hint of warmth in it, there was no hot water for the rubber bag. Besides, the chicken seemed too far gone for restoration, and she guiltily smothered him away under the fold of cotton batting and retreated to her chamber. But Microbe had by no means surrendered his sacred little claims to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The persistent prick of his muffled, frantic cries drove sleep from her pillow. She rose once more and, by inspiration, carried the diminutive mansion down cellar, where she placed it on top of the furnace! Instantly the genial heat reached that exhausted chick, who had battled for it so valiantly and long. The white-barred lids slipped up over the round black eyes--for chickens literally "shut their peepers up"--and he was asleep before his rescuer had turned away.

Joy-of-Life did not believe such a day-old atom of mortality could survive this woeful night. She came to my bedside at the breakfast hour and prepared me solemnly for word of Microbe's premature decease. But little did we know as yet the meaning of that maligned phrase "chicken-hearted." She descended at a funereal pace to the cellar, but with the sound of her swift returning feet I laughed to hear, clearer from stair to stair, an eager, spirited little pipe, "Chip, chip, chip! What's up now? Where are we going on this trip, trip?"

Such a wide-awake, enterprising speck of poultry it was that Joy-of-Life proudly set upon the counterpane! He gave prompt proof of his activity by scrambling madly for my plate, and fluttered down, with yellow winglets spread, exactly in the center of my slice of toast.

"It's spring chicken on toast he's giving yez," cried our delighted Mary, and in honor of that ready display of Irish humor, his name was forthwith abbreviated to Mike.

Then he hopped up into my neck, cuddled down, sang a little, contented song and went off to sleep again, waking to find himself the ruler of the roost.

Word of our mutual devotion went abroad and forthwith the critics began. A high-minded friend sent word that if she heard of my lavishing any more affection on that ridiculous little rooster, she would come and wring his yellow neck, and even the Madre herself, she who had borne with my foibles longest and most indulgently, wrote in a flash of scandalous uncharity that she wished I would rest content with the wild birds that God had made, and not waste attention on an illegitimate, incubator chicken.

But "God be with trewthe qwer he be!" The foolish fact is that, in the restlessness of convalescence, when work and worry, thought and humanity must still be shooed from the threshold, I found hourly mirth and comfort in that dot of sunshine. The phenomenal mists and rains of this first April of the new century caused such a dearth of golden lights in the world that a yellow chicken acquired peculiar values. The furnace-man said he was a Wyandotte and, as a feminine household, we invariably put absolute faith in the word of our furnace-man. I do not know how Wyandottes ought to look, but I know that this was a daffodil-colored mite, with legs and feet more slender than chicken wont, and with a hundred diverting, confiding, tyrannical little ways.

I never ceased marveling at the pluck with which this Lilliputian tackled life in the midst of such Brobdingnagian surroundings. The only time I ever saw him scared was when a guest, so well acquainted with chickens as to venture on personal liberties, flourished her glove over the graveled box that served poor little Mike for his Earthly Paradise.

"Squawk! squawk!" he cried in an agitated pipe I had not heard before, and scrabbled wildly to the shelter of my hand, nestling out of sight under the palm in his favorite fashion.

"Did you hear him call hawk, hawk?" asked my erudite visitor. "We have an old biddy at home who nurses a grudge against me this week because I will not let her set, and the last time I went out into the henyard, if she didn't scream hawk, hawk, just like that, and send the chickens scuttling to cover under the barn! The hateful thing! She knew how insulted I would feel to be taken for a hawk!"

But apart from that trying occasion, Mike was a scrap of valor. No member of the family was tall enough to disconcert him. He pecked whatever he saw, from his own feet to the register, and would pounce like a baby pirate upon objects many times larger than himself, cheeping to the world his tidings of magnificent discovery. I am no pastoral linguist, but I learned the rudiments of chicken language from Mike, who was such a chatterbox that he twittered in his sleep.

Meal-times, which he liked to have occur every hour from dawn to dark, brought out his conversational fluency at its best. We tried many experiments with his diet, in obedience to many counselors. We were told that his Indian meal should be mixed with scalding water, that he was too young for this hearty dish and should be fed with dry oatmeal, that minute crumbs of bread would comfort his crop, that larger bits of bread, kindly masticated in advance, were better, that sour milk was essential, mashed potato indispensable, string beans a plausible substitute for angle-worms, that he must be given a chance to swallow gravel to assist the grinding in his wee gizzard mill, and that his cereals should be discreetly spiced with grubs and lettuce leaves and such spring dainties. Whatever we were told to do, we did. Mike's repasts were thus seasons to him of delicious excitement, and he would tear deliriously from one end of his box to the other, pecking to right and left, exclaiming in high glee, "Tweet, tweet! Something to eat! Bless my pin-feathers! Here's a treat!"

This up-to-date son of an incubator had an obstinate instinct in him which made the tap of my finger on the floor of his box equivalent to the tattoo of a hen's bill beside some scratched-up delicacy, and it was funny to see him rush to the sound, his black eyes shining with joyous expectancy. So queerly did instinct serve him that he would grab the goody as if a brood of famished brothers were on his heels and, spreading his bits of wings, race off with his prize, most indiscreetly shrilling as he went, "Twit, twit, twit! You shan't have a bit," and gobbling it down in a corner with choking precipitation.

One of the "Arrows of the Wise" carries the point, "Be not idle and you shall not be longing," and I had no chance to miss my customary vocations with this importunate cockerel demanding constant society and care.

Hatched to the vain anticipation of brooding wings and crooning cluck and the restless pressure of other downy little bodies all about him, Mike was a lonesome chick and could not bear to have his sorry substitute for a mother-hen out of sight and sound a minute. His box must be within reach of my hand, whither every few minutes he would run for a snuggle and a snooze, turning a disdainful back on the elaborate hot-water-bottle and cotton-batting shelters I had been at such pains to erect. The life in him craved contact with life. If I withdrew my hand, having occasionally other uses for it, or neglected to respond to his casual remarks, my ears would suddenly be assailed by a storm of piteous chirps, the neck would stretch until two round eyes peered anxiously above his castle wall, and then, with clamber and scramble, that indomitable little spirit would achieve the impossible and land a fluttering fluff-ball against my face. When I was well enough to move from room to room Mike would dare the most terrific rumbles from his box to come chasing after, though every threshold was a towering obstacle over which a Labor Union of wings and legs could barely carry him.

After he had eaten his supper, with undiminished enthusiasm, and had drunk his fill from a butter-plate, lifting his yellow bill to heaven with every drink, and giving thanks, as all good chickens do, we used to tuck him away in a basket. At first we buried him deep under a light mass of cotton-wool, from the precise center of whose surface his head would shine out in the morning like a star set in fleecy clouds; but the chief of our advisory council warned us that the films might get into his eyes and down his gullet with disastrous results, and suggested instead the use of a retired table-scarf. Chicken in the cloth, cloth in the basket, basket on the register, the family would compose itself to listen to the "Life of Huxley," while the softest, drowsiest nest song, "Tweety-tweet! Tweety-tweet!" from the depths of the table-scarf accompanied the voice of the reader. The elfin music-box would fall silent presently, but when bedtime came, and Joy-of-Life, before taking the basket down cellar to hang it near the furnace for the night, brought it to me that I might ask, no matter how quietly, "All well, Mike?" a dreamy little note would instantly float back, "Tweety-tweet! Sleeping sweet!"

We grew so fond of our pet as to dislike to see him deprived of the natural companionship of chickenhood, and two other downy midgets--a Penciled Brahmapootra, the gift of the market-man, and a Plymouth Rock, from the Lady of Cedar Hill--were procured to bear him company. The first we dubbed Patience, as the proper associate of a Microbe, but this beautiful little fowl, whose golden face and delicately striped body gave it a wild-bird look, developed such shillalah characteristics, especially when Mike made off with the choice morsels, that his name was speedily curtailed to Pat. The Plymouth Rock was called Cluxley, in memory of our evening readings; but a meek, illogical, not to say unscientific henny-penny she proved, who would stand gazing on a dainty until one of her foster-brothers had snatched it up and then industriously go and scratch for it in all the places where it never could have been. Pat was a self-reliant, material-minded younker, and we let him go his own lively way, with the minimum of handling, but our brown Cluxley was of a clinging disposition and had an embarrassing habit of imperiling her life by stealthy excursions up loose sleeves. Mike did not welcome these birds of his own feather any too cordially and held somewhat aloof from them to the end. One of my students sent in a pair of dainty blue slippers, fortunately too small, as thus my conscience was clear in devoting them to the welfare of my immediate brood; but I always had to see to it that Mike and Pat took their siestas in separate slippers, where they would drowsily flute away in musical rivalry. Cluxley, with her customary indiscretion, bestowed herself one day in a damp rubber for her nap and caught a bad cold, which we successfully doctored with hempseed.