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He has been wonderfully mindful of me, always. Long before we left the city I had learned to enjoy outdoors from a cot under the trees in the back yard. The pain which was to be by turns my companion, my jailer, and my emancipator had already laid upon me an iron hand. I was up and about when the Peon was at home; but when he came in unexpectedly he learned to look for me under the drooping silver maples in the yard; and my old-time love of birds was an easy explanation of the many-cushioned cot and the long hours I daily spent upon it.

David filled the birds’ drinking fountain for me when he came home to leave his books and get his bat or his football; and I would lie there, watching my visitors, wondering at the variety of birds to be seen in a city yard, and wishing the sparrows’ duels were less on the harmless French order. They never fought because they needed to do it; it was always for something perfectly futile and foolish. They would leave all the food I could scatter to tear one crumb from a neighbor. For it is English sparrow nature never to be satisfied with what they have, to want only what some one else is enjoying, and to get it for themselves if they can. David and I were fully agreed that if anything more hateful was ever created we wished to be spared acquaintance with it.