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 6 BFI FILM CLASSICS

To the Angels of Inconclusive Right

on both sides, to the Angel of the Last
Minutes, to the Angels of Our
Estimated Times of Arrival and Departure.
Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love (1998)

Dunne assures us that in death we shall learn how to handle eternity

successfully. We shall recover all the moments of our lives and we shall
combine them as we please. God and our friends and Shakespeare will
collaborate with us.
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Time and J. W. Dunne’ (1952)

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 A M AT T E R O F L I F E A N D D E AT H 7

Foreword to the 2021 Edition

Revisiting a book written over twenty years ago is a rare privilege,

and a chance to reflect on what has happened in the interval. Most
fundamentally, A Matter of Life and Death (1946) (or amolad to
all admirers) has changed its substance in some important ways,
reflecting the transmutation of film over the sixty years that I have
known it. Unlike The Archers’ first great Technicolor achievement,
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), amolad was never
cut, at least in its UK versions. I’m fairly sure that I first saw it on
television in the 1960s, before showing an unusually vivid 16mm
print to art college students in the early 1970s. And for the BFI’s 1978
Powell–Pressburger retrospective, there was the option of an original
35mm nitrate print from the National Film Archive, retaining the
tonal qualities that this process had made possible in 1946. But
most screenings in the many programmes that brought Powell and
Pressburger back into view during the 1980s had to rely on inferior
Eastmancolor release prints.
Why should this archaeology concern us today, with the film so
widely available in video versions, on disc and online? It matters, I
would argue, because many of the judgments that still attach to this,
like all historic films, were made at a time when these were difficult,
or even impossible to see. Often they were, quite literally, youthful
prejudices – such as the damning reaction to amolad by Lindsay
Anderson and some of his fellow Oxford students in their magazine
Sequence. Of course, easier access wouldn’t necessarily change
original verdicts; but at least we can now check, reconsider and
discuss with others.
In the case of amolad, we also now have dramatically
improved versions of the film, as a result of two scrupulous
restorations separated by nearly twenty years, both overseen by

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 8 BFI FILM CLASSICS

the American archivist Grover Crisp and using the original three-
strip camera negatives. In 1999, Crisp was unable to correct all the
distortions caused by age and film shrinkage, but by 2017 digital
techniques offered new possibilities for correction. Like The Red
Shoes (1948) and Blimp, amolad can now be seen at a level of
quality which subjects its artifice to searching scrutiny.
Does it hold up? I’m probably not the best critic to judge, since
it’s my declared favourite among all films (and my commentary
accompanies the latest restoration). But I think it does. Like The
Archers’ other masterpieces, the more of it we can see and hear, the
more there is to admire, and speculate about.
One area of speculation which I raised in this book is how
much the film was subject to improvisation while in production.
We know that Michael Powell took his and Pressburger’s script on
his crossing to America in 1945, to work over it again, as he usually
did. And in A Life in Movies, he recalled how Emeric ‘looked a
little dismayed when he saw how thin the script had become’1 after
retyping in New York, without saying any more about what he had
changed or dropped. Or about his additions.
From the evidence of the script held by BFI Special Collections,
annotated in Powell’s distinctive handwriting, it seems likely that
many of these came about during production, although they must
have required advance planning where cast and extra set design were
required (see p. 26). Powell admits in his memoir to introducing
a Coca-Cola machine in the heavenly Cloakroom, much to the
annoyance of his designer Alfred Junge, which provides a neat
stereotypical gag as the American bomber crew ‘deviate’ towards
it. But from the nearly two dense pages of annotation to this scene,
it appears to have been entirely invented while shooting, complete
with nationality gags, and Richard Attenborough’s famous line
‘It’s Heaven’, as he looks down at the vast record office where clerks
toil on ‘Living Records’.
Equally important was the reshaping of the scene where
Dr Reeves meets Peter for the first time over tea at Lee Wood House.

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 A M AT T E R O F L I F E A N D D E AT H 9

Annotated page from Michael Powell’s shooting script

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 10 BFI FILM CLASSICS

Here there is no script annotation to explain the importation of

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which provides not
only similar cross-cultural comedy to the Waiting Room, but also
extraordinary resonance for the film’s ‘two worlds’ theme. The script
merely called for ‘a bunch of American girls and boys rehearsing a
play or concert’, which Powell must have felt was too schematic –
while seeing an opportunity to include more relevant cultural
cross-referencing.
It would be unfair to suggest that all these ‘improvements’ were
the result of Powell reworking what was essentially Pressburger’s
script. A Life in Movies makes clear that it was Pressburger who
realised a fantasy was needed to meet the Ministry of Information’s
ambition for ‘an epic film about two great nations, full of colour
and larger than life’.2 And it must surely have been Pressburger who
identified his fellow-countryman Frigyes Karinthy’s idiosyncratic
memoir A Journey Round My Skull as a starting point. But after
the disappointing critical reaction to A Canterbury Tale, recalled by
Powell as having a ‘frail and unconvincing’3 story, despite the acclaim
that it had received after restoration in 1978, he was determined
to ensure that this statement of ‘all that [he] knew and loved about
England’4 would not misfire.
I think this determination can be seen in many of the revisions,
as well as in the boldest strokes of structure and design. The original
opening narration started with a ‘casual voice’ offering a modest
introduction to the solar system, noting a few bright stars and
familiar planets. In its finished version, the film begins with the
immortal opening: ‘This is the universe … big, isn’t it?’, followed
by a reference to someone ‘messing around with the uranium atom’
in another galaxy, no doubt added with the nuclear devastation of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in mind.
The film would be released into a world fraught with post-
war apprehension, as the later part of this book chronicles. Not
only did America have to be persuaded that Britain’s imperial past
had benevolent aspects, but between them, Roger Livesey and

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 A M AT T E R O F L I F E A N D D E AT H 11

England in question
on the night of a
1,000 bomber raid
on Germany

David Niven had to make the case for a forward-looking Britain.

The combination of different levels of technical wizardry – from
a teardrop glistening on a rose to a giant ‘stairway to heaven’,
eclipsing what had previously been attempted in cinema’s ‘wartime
supernatural’ – showed Powell rising to the occasion as ‘high priest
of the mysteries’5 (as he would describe himself, perhaps ironically, in
the second volume of his memoirs, Million Dollar Movie).
One feature of the film’s elaborate apparatus has long intrigued
me, as it has many admirers. When Livesey’s Dr Reeves surveys the
kingdom of his village by means of a camera obscura, this has often
been seen as anticipating Powell’s later thwarted attempt to film
Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with Reeves’s observation of his patients
a benevolent version of Prospero’s surveillance over his island. But
why should this unusual device have appeared in a film in 1945? For
a plausible recent answer, I am indebted to Diane Friedman, one of
many specialist researchers who have shed light on aspects of Powell
and Pressburger’s work in recent years. Powell’s mother had moved
to live near Dumfries in Scotland in 1943, she observes, where he
would visit her by means of overnight train journeys during the years
when he was preparing amolad. And Dumfries happens to boast the
world’s oldest working camera obscura, housed in a windmill tower,

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 12 BFI FILM CLASSICS

Optical mastery:
Dr Reeves surveying
his patients by
camera obscura

with rope controls similar to those we see in the film. Powell may
well have seen this, but we know he also made a hands-on visit to
Edinburgh’s camera obscura in 1944, renamed the Outlook Tower by
the visionary town planner Patrick Geddes. He must have seen how
this could join the escalator and the operating theatre to make the
complex metaphysics of amolad more concretely visible. As Reeves
tells June, it enables him to ‘see [the village] all at once and clearly, as
in a poet’s eye’.
Many sources for aspects of the film are, and will probably
remain obscure. But what’s now abundantly clear is that it has
inspired its own extensive network of allusions and quotations.
These range from direct references in such films as Patrick Keiller’s
Robinson in Space (1997), Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (Peter Hewitt,
1991) and Captain America: The First Avenger (Joe Johnston, 2011),
to acknowledgment of its influence on the climax of the Harry Potter
franchise Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (David Yates,
2011). Perhaps strangest of all was the inclusion of a brief reference
in the 2012 London Olympics opening fantasia Isles of Wonder,
where the heroine of the ‘Frankie and June say … thanks Tim’
segment was named after Kim Hunter’s character. With this, followed
by a commemorative postage stamp image in 2014 and many other

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 A M AT T E R O F L I F E A N D D E AT H 13

homages, amolad might be said to have finally achieved the status of

a national emblem.
Could any of this have been predicted, even after it was chosen
for the first post-war Royal Command Film Performance in 1946?
Hardly. The films of Powell and Pressburger were largely ignored
by the first generation of cinema scholars and connoisseurs in the
1960s and 70s. And despite the efforts of isolated supporters, such as
Ray Durgnat and Kevin Gough-Yates, they would remain outsiders
until the 1980s, when the advocacy of a new generation of American
film-makers, many initially inspired by Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960),
would effectively sweep away British reserve.
This is a history that I’ve lived through, and played some part
in. So not only has amolad been modified over time, but I have too,
by introducing and commenting on it in countless situations. As I
said, it’s a rare experience to re-encounter one’s younger self in print,
trying earnestly to convey why this is surely one of the greatest of
films from an inspired decade. But it is.

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 14 BFI FILM CLASSICS

Acknowledgments

Many people have contributed to my understanding of A Matter of

Life and Death over the years. Among the first were my students at
Derby College of Art and Technology (now the University of Derby)
in the early 1970s; and more recently students on the Stanford
in Oxford Programme in 1995–6. At the BFI, I was fortunate to
have advice and help of different sorts from David Meeker, Ken
Wlaschin, Clyde Jeavons, Colin McArthur and Erich Sergeant when
working on various Archers projects. Like all subsequent writers
on Powell and Pressburger, I have drawn heavily on Kevin Gough-
Yates’s and Raymond Durgnat’s pioneering publications; and I now
admire even more John Ellis’s extraordinarily prescient study of
this film, ‘Watching Death at Work’, specially written for Powell,
Pressburger and Others, which I edited in 1978. An invitation to
talk about Powell and Pressburger at the Munich Film Museum in
1996 from Andreas Rost and Jan-Christopher Horak, with support
from the British Council, made me think further about The Archers’
wartime films; and I must thank Sian Griffiths of the Times Higher
Education Supplement for an opportunity to write about amolad.
(Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger always referred to the film
as amolad, just as I Know Where I’m Going! was ikwig, and in
the absence of any better short titles, I have generally used these
throughout the book.)
For generous access to materials from the film-makers’ papers,
I am grateful to Kevin Macdonald and the trustees of the Pressburger
estate and to Thelma Schoonmaker-Powell and the trustees of
the Powell estate. I have benefited greatly from Diane Friedman’s
continuing research on the medical basis of the film and thank her
for making this available. At a late stage in the writing, I encountered
PhD theses by Andrew Moor and Val Wilson on The Archers, both

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 A M AT T E R O F L I F E A N D D E AT H 15

of which I found illuminating, as was Philip Horne’s Oxford seminar.

I am grateful for Markku Salmi’s sterling work on the credits and
help with personnel research; for discussion of the film’s music with
Julian Philips, a recording from David Thompson, a letter from Paul
Hammond and advice from Sue Nightingale, Ian Smith and Mark
Fuller. The libraries of Magdalen College, Oxford, the University
of Kent and Senate House, University of London were helpful and
tolerant of overdue loans; the IMDb has become ever more valuable;
and as usual the BFI Library was indispensable as was the British
Library’s newspaper library.
Ed Buscombe commissioned this book longer ago than I would
like to admit; and Rob White has patiently steered it to completion.
I am grateful to them, as I am to my family (and to Roger and Jane),
for their forbearance while the ‘wrap’ seemed endlessly delayed. And
it still wouldn’t have happened without Patsy.
Special thanks are now due to Rebecca Barden and Sophie
Contento for their care in steering this new edition to a handsome
completion.

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 16 BFI FILM CLASSICS

1 Beginnings

Where I come in …
Having loved A Matter of Life and Death (1946) for over a quarter
of a century, I finally had to decide how highly I rated it several
years ago. A newspaper asked me to write about ‘my favourite film’.
I considered the options – rescuing something obscure; new light
on a classic; a childhood enthusiasm revisited; Hollywood or not –
before concluding that the subject of this book really had to be it.6
What surprised me was realising how much resistance even I had
to selecting a British film, putting my critical judgment where my
advocate’s mouth had long been. Writing the book has become an
attempt to explore this unease. The result is not a close reading of
the film’s text, which would occupy another book, nor even a full
account of its making (yet another book), but a contextual reading,
aiming to place it in its own time and ours.
A Matter of Life and Death (hereafter amolad) has for too
long been a prisoner of its founding premise. Originally conceived as
wartime propaganda, it couldn’t be made until after the war’s end,
when its message risked seeming out of date. But even if it started as
a contribution to improving Anglo-American relations, there is ample
evidence that its makers also had much larger and less circumstantial
ambitions. And over the years, despite critical disdain and frequent
regret over its propaganda aims, audiences have discovered for
themselves that it is a poetic and provocative fantasy. It now ranks
number twenty in the BFI’s poll of the British Top 100 (and number
two in the BFI Library users’ poll, indicating higher status among
students and scholars?). But even if it’s a confirmed favourite, is it
more than this? And who cares if it isn’t?
Well, I care, because what’s at stake echoes the film’s ostensible
theme – defending Britain’s ‘cause’ (or ‘case’) in the post-war world.

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 A M AT T E R O F L I F E A N D D E AT H 17

Its uncertain critical reputation invites us to consider how to defend

a British film against the claims of cinema’s accredited classics –
Eisenstein, Ford, Renoir, Welles, or Hollywood’s great collaborative
fantasies of the 1930s and 40s.
In at least one respect, it must be a contender. The opening of
amolad remains one of the most remarkable of any film, even by the
standards of two illustrious precursors which probably influenced it –
The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) with its tornado transition
from Kansas to Munchkin-land; and Citizen Kane (Orson Welles,
1941), which starts with an atmospheric death scene, before crashing
into its brash pseudo-newsreel. amolad begins with nothing less
than a guided tour of the universe, moving us past nebulae and
novae, with an authoritative, slightly amused, voice making the
cosmic seem cosy: ‘And here’s the earth, our earth, part of the grand
design. Reassuring isn’t it?’ But if we have been reassured, this
equilibrium is abruptly shattered as we find ourselves in the wrecked
cockpit of a bomber, blazing in full Technicolor, listening to its pilot’s
last radio exchange. Powell and Pressburger had already rehearsed
this shock-beginning in their earlier ‘… one of our aircraft is missing’
(1942), which starts with a mysteriously empty bomber, an aerial
Marie Celeste, that crashes before we travel back in time to discover
what happened to its missing crew.
But here there’s no doubling back, no flashback reassurance.
This pilot really is going to die, unless a miracle saves him – which
it does in a distinctively modern way, resulting from a bureaucratic
mistake of the kind only too familiar to those who had lived through
the war with uncertain news of loved ones’ fate. Also a ruefully
patriotic one, since the pilot misses his rendezvous with death thanks
to ‘a real English fog’. But even before we discover his plight, we’re
treated to a condensed self-presentation that is more rhetorical than
anything in Kane. The voice we hear for a full seventy seconds before
we see its owner answers an imaginary questionnaire – age, education,
religion, politics – as well as quoting Raleigh and Marvell to a
bewildered radio operator. By the end of their passionate exchange,

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 18 BFI FILM CLASSICS

An airman’s love letter

to England: Peter in
the blazing cockpit

they have all but pledged their love in the face of the pilot’s imminent
death – a twist on (or merely an example of?) that other cliché of
wartime romance, the kiss before dying.
Today, the effect is ultra-melodramatic, teetering on the edge
of absurdity. At various public cinema screenings over the years, I
have felt that familiar rising embarrassment, just held in check by the
headlong bravado and humour of the writing, and by David Niven’s
compelling delivery. Yet the association of pilots and poetry wasn’t
new. A poem had provided the emotional pivot of Rattigan’s and
Asquith’s elegiac 1945 flying drama The Way to the Stars.7 And just
four years later Jean Cocteau would have his modern Orpheus take
dictation by car radio from beyond the grave in Orphée. Poetry was
indeed in the air.
Then comes the film’s biggest, boldest stroke, its bid for
immortality. Suddenly we’re in a cool modernist heaven in black and
white, staffed by efficient angels wearing Women’s Auxilliary Air
Force (WAAF) uniforms and reached by escalator. Contemporary
audiences may well have thought of The Wizard of Oz, perhaps
realising this neatly reversed that film’s reality/fantasy colour scheme.
They might also have been reminded of the futuristic décor of Things
to Come (William Cameron Menzies, 1936), which had been reissued

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 A M AT T E R O F L I F E A N D D E AT H 19

early in the war, and recalled Raymond Massey’s similar roles in

both films. Critics of the time recalled other ‘two worlds’ fantasies,
such as The Ghost Goes West (René Clair, 1936), Here Comes Mr.
Jordan (Alexander Hall, 1941) or Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch,
1943), although few thought that amolad measured up to these.8
Ambitious, technically accomplished, imaginative – but ultimately
shallow or silly, according to the more intellectual critics who might
have been expected to appreciate it. Humphrey Swingler delivered the
most scathing of the ‘yes, but’ verdicts:

in this fantasy of two worlds the authors’ continual concessions to the

romantic (box-office) conception of entertainment flatten the idea behind
their story. In the very first reel the effect of an exceptionally ingenious entrée
to the supernatural nature of the film, via a slow panning shot across the
stratosphere, is completely spoiled by an extremely tedious dialogue between
doomed-bomber-pilot David Niven and an anguished WAC Kim Hunter in the
conventional war-film idiom.
[I]t is time that the Powell–Pressburger combination achieved
something more than mere oddity; time for them perhaps to stop reaching
for the moon and, if they can, plant their four feet on the earth with their
contemporary technicians. For they would be in no mean company. Asquith,
Carol Reed, Launder and Gilliat, the Boultings, Thorold Dickinson and
David Lean among others, are establishing a tradition of solid native skill to
which the latest production of this better-known combination contributes
almost nothing.9

I quote this, not to mock its shortsightedness, but because it goes

to the heart of the matter: how to mount a case for a film so out
of step with other British film-making during what was felt to be a
renaissance of national cinema? My defence will involve exploring
the roots of the film in myth, in Shakespeare, in the tradition of
masque and allegory, in English ‘time culture’ and 1940s Neo-
Romanticism, in contemporary medicine; as well as in production
research being carried on within Rank, and the development of

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 20 BFI FILM CLASSICS

Technicolor itself. What this will reveal is not a poor, provincial

imitation of Clair, Lubitsch, Capra et al., but a pioneering work
both of and beyond its time. One patronised – as was Shakespeare in
his own day – but now clearly able to bear an exceptional range of
interpretation and analysis.10

Origins
Like all Powell and Pressburger’s previous joint films (although only
one after, The Red Shoes (1948)), amolad was an original script;
and like at least four of their wartime productions, it was in some
sense ‘commissioned’ for propaganda, or public relations purposes.
Powell told the story on several occasions of how Jack Beddington,
head of the film department at the Ministry of Information, had
suggested over ‘a very good lunch’ that The Archers might tackle the
theme of worsening Anglo-American relations.11 Many in Britain
had formed a negative impression of the American service personnel
whose presence had grown during 1944; and during the last phase
of the war, there was increasing resentment over American claims of
leadership and Britain’s growing economic and material dependence
on its ally. The Archers were no strangers to this delicate subject,
after 49th Parallel (1941) and, more idiosyncratically, A Canterbury
Tale (1944).12
According to Powell’s later account, Beddington wanted ‘a big
film’ which would, in Archers’ style, ‘put things the way that people
understand without understanding’.13 Pressburger duly conceived ‘a
real fantasy with supernatural beings’, in ‘a kind of surrealism’ that,
crucially, ‘would need Technicolor’. When this proved unavailable,
he quickly devised another forward-looking film that could be made
in monochrome, I Know Where I’m Going!, although this was not
finished until September 1945 – by which time The Archers had
already committed to amolad (probably in January) and the end
of the war was clearly in sight. Why did they revert to a propaganda
piece, when conventional wisdom would have suggested that
audiences needed anything but another war film?

9781839023897_txt_app.indd 20 08/06/2021 10:24

Other documents randomly have
different content
 CHAPTER XXIII
CARDINAL BABIES

Bird-lovers who have long waited for the advent of certain young
birds will understand my interest in this little fellow. I called him or
her, for I did not know the sex, Natal or Natalie, for he was hatched
on the twenty-first of June, the natal day of Halifax.
The last thing at night and the first thing in the morning I looked
out to the trees on the veranda to see if he were quite safe and
comfortable, and I slept with my window wide open so that I could
hear any disturbance in the night.
One very bright moonlight night last summer I heard my
handsome robin Dixie give a loud shriek of dismay, and begin to fly
nervously about the veranda. I find robins are nervous sleepers. The
least thing wakens them, and I lay for a few seconds listening to him
calling and flying to and fro. When he began to rouse the other birds
I sprang up and went softly to the window. I could see nothing, so I
spoke to the birds, and when they quieted down, went back to bed.
Presently he started again, and this time some of the birds,
instead of merely flying to and fro, began to throw themselves
against the wire netting of the veranda.
A panic in an aviary is a serious thing, especially if there are
several hundreds of birds who lose their heads at the same time. In
my aviary I always have dark corners where birds can fly and hide. I
would never put birds under a transparent roof with no place of
retreat.
However, this night panic was different from a fright by day. The
birds had been violently awakened from sleep, and had completely
lost their heads. They had not sense enough to keep in the
protected corners when they got in them. Something unforeseen
and startling had occurred, and again I crept softly to the window. I
could see nothing out of the way. Of course my mind went to the
cats, but since I had had the board put around the elevator, no cat
had ascended it.
Finally, I noticed a dark mass behind one of the trees. It was
motionless, and I concluded that it was one of the bunches of seed-
grass I tossed among the branches for the birds. However, to make
sure, I would examine it. I stole across the veranda, and there
outside the netting, perched on the railing, was a large black cat
looking me calmly in the eyes.
I told her what I thought of her and her family and she took it
gracefully. Then I said “Scat,” and told her to go down whatever way
she had come up.
She coolly retreated a few paces to a Virginia creeper, and swung
herself down, as I suppose she had come up—namely, paw over
paw.
“The naughty cat has gone, birdies,” I said, and went back to my
room.
To prove the nervousness of robins, I will only have to say that in
a few seconds Dixie was screaming again. This was pure
reminiscence. The cat had gone, there was nothing there; but this
time he acted worse than he had yet done, and he frightened one
bird into hysterics. I heard this one knocking himself against the wire
netting like a catapult.
How could any bird head stand that dreadful thumping? I hurried
to the spot, and to my dismay discovered that the bird gone crazy
with terror was my baby cardinal.
I descended upon him, clasped him in my hand—though I always
prefer to catch a bird in a cloth—and absolutely flew to the veranda-
room. In there it was dark, and he could not see to beat himself
against the windows.
His breath was coming in fluttering gasps—of course he thought
the cat had him. I put him quickly on the floor and ran from the
room.
I was afraid he was dying. “If I lose him,” I said to myself, “how
can I forgive that cat?”
I scarcely dared look from my window in the morning; but there,
oh, joyful sight! was my beloved baby bird running to and fro along
the windows of the veranda-room, trying to get out.
I speedily opened the door, and he flew to his parents, who were
delighted to see him.
Strange to say, though they beat him, they would scream angrily
at me if I approached too near the little fellow. They kept up a kind
of interest in him, though they chastised him.
All day I watched my bird baby, and it seemed to me that nothing
for a long time had made me as happy as his escape from death by
fright.
I forgave the cat, but the next day I had to call back this
forgiveness. I was standing in the middle of the veranda, when I
heard, a sound that always strikes dread to my heart. It was a
wretched, asthmatic breathing that I have never known a bird to
recover from.
Which one was the victim? My eye ran anxiously around my small
bird world. Not Red-top; no, he would be the last one I could give
up. Not Touzle, the dear mother bird, not Dixie, best and brightest of
robins, not his friend the sparrow, not Blue Boy the indigo bunting,
nor the goldfinch Boy, nor Andy and his mate, nor any of the sweet-
singing canaries. Not old man Java, nor the rosy-faced love-birds,
and not, oh, no! not my last, but almost best-loved bird, the cardinal
baby.
I stepped near to him and he flew away. The hard breathing
stopped, and it seemed to me for a minute that my heart stopped
too. I followed him, and the wretched, rasping sound was now quite
close to me. My baby was doomed. I would have to give him up. In
some brighter, fairer world I might see that pretty creature mature
and perhaps live forever—who knows—for many wise men say that
there will be a future life for birds, that an all-wise and all-merciful
Father will never utterly destroy any created thing that has in it the
spark of life.
There was only one thing to be thankful for. I would have time to
get acquainted with the certainty of his death—and as far as I could
observe, a bird’s sufferings were not extreme when afflicted in this
way. The canary Britisher had the same trouble, and he seemed to
get a great deal of pleasure out of life. So day by day I watched my
pet, and delighted in giving him all the dainties he would eat.
He lingered on until I left home in the autumn, but shortly
afterward died. I heard that the dear little bird with the reddish-
brown crest had been picked up dead on the floor of the aviary.
Poor baby—I cannot think of him without emotion, but to my joy I
have dreamed of seeing him well and happy and trotting about
among his former companions.
Some one speaks of birds “making sweet music in one’s dreams,”
and I often have the pleasure of seeing my pets about me during my
sleeping moments.
Next summer I hope my Brazil cardinals will be more successful in
the raising of young ones. I notice that year after year they get
tamer and more reasonable.
One morning last August I heard Red-top making a great noise
about daybreak. His usual habit during summer is to wake at the
first streak of day and begin singing in a whisper, and gradually to
ascend into a hearty song. This particular morning he was so noisy
that I went to the glass door and said, “You are making a great
racket, my boy. Think of the neighbors.”
Before I spoke to him he had been swelling out his throat, singing
with all his might, “Cheery, deary, wearie, dearie,” supposedly, to
enliven Touzle on her woven nest near him.
After I spoke to him, he put his crested head on one side, as if to
think over what I had said and remarked, “Hi, hi; that’s true!” then
went off to play with his mirror, singing in a lower key, and tapping it
briskly with his beak.
My birds all follow his example of singing before it is really light,
then, getting their breakfast later on, when they can see well.
Red-top amused my married sister one day by falling into a trap
we set for him. I wanted to catch him for some reason or other, and
put some of his favorite dishes into a large cage and tied a string to
the door.
He watched me cunningly, and would not go in.
“Please take the string,” I said to my sister; “I believe he will go in
for you.”
 I left him, and she said after I had gone he threw her a careless
glance, as if to say, “You don’t count, you never catch us,” and
immediately walked into the cage, whereupon she laughed at him
and pulled the string.
All my cardinals have been very strong birds, and never for one
instant lose their spirit. Whenever I catch one—Virginian or Brazilian
—they fight me, bite my fingers, and fall into a rage of resentment
without terror. They know I won’t hurt them, but they want me to
know that they are birds of too high lineage to be handled.
One day Red-top got one leg so tangled in a long bit of twine he
was weaving into his nest that he could not move. I had to call my
sister to help me cut him free, and he fought us all the time we were
engaged in our amiable task.
Another day he got whitewash in his eyes. That too made him
angry, and I telephoned to our physician, who told me to wash his
eyes with warm water, then put in sweet-oil with a medicine-dropper.
The next day I bathed them with boracic acid, and in a short time he
was quite well.
So great a favorite with me is this charming bird that for his sake I
fall into a state of such sadness when I see his fellows in shop
windows that I can scarcely describe my feelings, lest I be taxed
with exaggeration. The suffering I experience is perhaps akin to that
of the devoted friend or relative of a bright and beloved child who
sees another child resembling him in a wretched and unhappy home.
For the sake of the first dear child you shudder as you witness the
sad case of the second. So with the Brazil cardinals. I most earnestly
hope that the time will soon come when the iniquitous traffic in
foreign birds will be stopped. We are protecting our native birds.
Why not extend our protection to the helpless, lovely, and interesting
foreigners? They too suffer, and beat their young lives away against
cruel prison-bars.
Here in this large and kind-hearted city of Boston I saw the other
day European goldfinches and linnets going up and down their
cages, trying the wires with their little beaks, pleading vainly for
freedom. My heart ached as I looked at them.
 I often say to bird-dealers, “How thankful I am that you can no
longer sell native birds.” These men do not care. There are plenty of
other birds on the market. Now, if we can only free the unfortunate
foreigners, bird-dealers who really love birds will find occupation in
bird reservations and large aviaries, for I have come to the
conclusion that undomesticated birds should be confined only for
some wise purpose, or for scientific research.
I have already said that I ordered a mate for my red Virginian
Ruby as well as for Red-top. When she arrived I found that instead
of being a rosy-red bird like the male, she was of a dull brownish-
vermilion. However, she was a handsome bird, and in fine condition.
She darted from her traveling-cage, and the brilliant Ruby fell into
the most ludicrous state of amusement, ecstasy, and bewilderment.
He acted like a simpleton, flying to and fro after her, twisting his
body from side to side, spreading his tail and wings, elevating and
lowering his fine crest, singing at the top of his voice, then winding
up with something earnestly delivered that sounded like, “What a
dear! what a dear!”
All this was going on at the same time that the naughty Red-top
was beating poor Touzle. I watched both pairs of birds, and Ruby’s
bodily contortions were so fantastic that I was overcome with
laughter.
He paid no attention to me. He was altogether taken up with the
vivacious and handsome Virginia, who would not allow him to come
near her. She flew from one end of the aviary to the other, switching
her tail from side to side, avoiding him systematically, and making
him sleep away off from her when night came.
This shyness did not last. Soon the two were very great friends,
and flew about together all day long. Ruby’s delight in the
companionship of one of his own kind took the form of feeding her.
He kept the choicest morsels he found and put in her beak, almost
exercising self-denial, for at the time of her arrival I did not have a
sufficient supply of his favorite insect food in the aviary. If there was
only one worm, Virginia got it.
I don’t know whether she appreciated his devotion or not. She
was a restless creature, very unlike Touzle, who was quiet and
reposeful. Virginia never kept still for any length of time, unless it
was the nesting season. Then she sat quietly on her nest, day after
day, and week after week.
I had some curious experiences with her, and every season it was
the same thing. She made a nest, laid eggs, sat patiently on them till
they hatched out, then began to feed the young ones until the day
that I found them either on the ground, or laid out in a row on a
window-ledge.
I got to dread the sound of young Virginians chirping in the nest.
They were rarely allowed to live more than a few days, and it was
painful to find the plump, dead bodies, well-shaped and looking well-
nourished. What killed them? I shut up one suspect after another.
The gallinules, the mockingbird and Ruby himself. Red-top would not
dare to go near his enemy’s nest. Not until two years ago did I
discover that Virginia herself lifted them out.
This was a blow to the mother-love theory, but I gave her the
credit of thinking that the young ones died in the nest, and not
being able to endure the sight, she took them out. They were rarely
mutilated. They had been carefully carried in her powerful beak.
One day I was shocked to find three young ones about ten days
or a fortnight old squirming on the window-ledge. This was
downright murder. I revived one, kept him for part of the day, then
he died. These were fine young birds with feathers starting.
I puzzled more and more. There was plenty of food in the aviary,
and Virginia herself was in fine condition, for she would make three
or four, or even five nests a year. This last summer she murdered
four sets of young ones. I took a fifth lot from her, but they died on
my hands. I had one theory after another to account for this
slaughter but none of them was satisfactory. Feeling that another
bird-lover might be more successful with her in the nesting season, I
sent her this autumn, with Ruby, to a skilled curator of birds, and
next summer I shall await results with interest.
I shall miss her and Ruby immensely for, strange to say, the
Virginian female possesses a song almost equal to that of the male
bird. When she was upstairs and Ruby down below, and they sang
to each other, I often sat in my study listening to them and thinking
of Mary McGowan’s lines with regard to the red cardinal:

No slumber songster he, with vesper warblings low,

But bold his every note, and full and strong:
In his clear ringing pledge, hear him unstop the flow,
Then gurgle forth the red wine of his song.

Virginia never became very tame, but Ruby reminded me of a dog,

in his ways. One night I shut him in the furnace-room for some
reason or other, but he fretted to get back to Virginia, and after dark
I went downstairs with my small candle lantern, for I had to be
careful what sort of a light I carried among the dry spruces and firs
of the aviary. Ruby was pressed against the wire door. He spoke to
me, and I held the lantern close to him and guided his feet back to
Virginia. Too impatient to wait he hopped on ahead, and I followed
quickly, trying to keep the swinging light steady.
He was so reasonable, so sure of me, so grateful for what I was
doing, that I could scarcely refrain from seizing his pretty red body in
my hands and caressing him as I do my pet pigeons whom I often
wake from their sleep.
When he got near Virginia he climbed into a tree with a satisfied
“Tsip!” and I left him.
He was an exquisite night singer; indeed, one of his names is the
American nightingale, and one summer I had to request him to
descend to the basement to sleep, as his loud night-singing
disturbed a delicate neighbor. He was a very mischievous bird, and
one day when I was carrying a hammer and nails about the aviary,
he espied a match in the box, and darting down, flew off with it for
his nest. I pursued him for a long time before I could persuade him
to drop the dangerous plaything.
It is a great delight to me to reflect that these lovely cardinals can
no longer be bought in the birdstores. How any one can enjoy the
sight of this bright red bird, with his wild, free spirit hopping to and
fro in the narrow confines of a cage, is as much of a mystery to me
as the wearing of his dull and lifeless skin in a hat. We must educate
our children into the conviction that a dead bird is as grotesque an
ornament as a dead mouse or a dead frog.
 CHAPTER XXIV
SPARROWS AND SWALLOWS

Poor little brown immigrants, how many enemies and how few
friends they have, and yet what have they done to deserve so hard a
fate? Merely following out the biblical instruction to multiply and
increase—they always remind me of true Anglo-Saxon stock. They
protect the family, they fight all strangers and, “Colonize, colonize,”
is their motto.
I have had quite an extensive acquaintance with the English
sparrow, both in town and in the country, and I think that this bad
boy of the air has a worse name than he deserves. Undoubtedly he
is bad; so are all boys, and all birds, and all men and women. We
want supervision, correction, restriction—but the sparrow has good
points.
Sparrow mothers lead all birds in mothering, as far as my
observation goes. Again and again I have put a baby sparrow on the
roof. He is a stranger picked up in the street. I do not know what
nest he comes from, he does not know, no one knows. He is like the
poor dog in the express car on a certain railway that ate up his tag.
No one knew what place he was bound for.
Well, the instant the lost sparrow opens his little beak and gives a
cry of distress, three or four mother sparrows come flying toward
him with their beaks full of food. They don’t wait to see whose baby
he is, as some human mothers would wait. He is a baby, and he is
hungry, and they are going to feed him, and they do it until he
flutters from the roof, and I have to pick him up and take care of
him myself. If I put him in a cage and set him back on the roof, the
street sparrows will try all day long to feed him through the bars.
Yes, indeed, a mother sparrow is the best mother bird I know.
I have never tried them with the young of other birds, but I have
tried their young with canaries. My canaries are the dearest and best
of parents to their own nestlings, but none of them will feed the
babies of other canaries. As for young robins, yellow warblers,
finches, and sparrows, they utterly ignore them, unless they have
particularly piercing voices. In these cases the canaries grow
nervous and stuff their own young ones as if they thought the cries
of distress issued from their throats.
Once I saw a canary hitch up to a young sparrow and look down
its throat. He then shook his crest and hopped away, as if to say, “I
could never fill that cavity.” Two summers ago I put a demure, well-
behaved young sparrow baby into a cage of German canaries. She
hopped into the nest, settled her little gray body down among the
four yellow birds, and unheeding the mother’s impatient pushes and
shrugs, sat there till she grew old enough to take to a perch. After a
time I took her out of the cage and put her on the veranda. She
played there all day, but every night she came in to sleep near the
canaries.
I knew she was in the room, for she flew out every morning when
I opened the screen-door, but where was her sleeping-place? I
looked high and low, but could not find her for a long time, until late
one night, when I was saying, “I wonder where that bird is?” I saw
something move slightly on the top of the canaries’ cage. A sheet
was thrown over it, and under the sheet was the smallest and
flattest projection. I laughed as I looked at it, and said, “I have
found it at last.”
Every night this quaint little sparrow, Judy by name, had crawled
up under the sheet and had slept on the wires of the cage, over her
foster-mother and the young canaries. It was a very uncomfortable
sleeping-place, and after I found her out she never used it again,
but took to a box on the wall near a mirror. There she sat calmly
gazing at me night after night as I held up the light to look at her.
She was so interesting that I could not let her go. She seems to
recognize a certain kinship with the street sparrows, for she chirps
excitedly to them, but she does not care to go out with them, and
has chosen for a mate a widowed Java sparrow, who is not so
devoted to her as she is to him. He is good to her, however, and flies
about with her, but she does all the nest-making. This summer she
had a curious structure of straw among some fir branches that she
kept adding to, until it was over a foot long. For some months she
laid eggs in the middle of this nest. Occasionally I took out a few
and gave them to the other birds to eat, but when I lifted the nest
down this autumn there were still a dozen in it.
I was sorry she had been too flighty to rear some Java and English
sparrow-hybrids. They would have been most interesting. Perhaps
she will have more steadiness next summer. I used to be amused
with her at breakfast-time. She would lean far out of her nest to see
what I was giving to the other birds, then with a joyful sound to her
mate that sounded like, “O Java,” she would fly down to investigate.
One sparrow I had, learned to sing some of the notes of the Brazil
cardinal. The cardinal hated him and beat him frequently, but the
sparrow followed him from place to place, and practised his little
tune till it was becoming quite perfect. A sparrow is said to have a
good vocal apparatus, and I suppose there is no reason why he
should not sing if he wants to. Unfortunately, I put this bird out of
the aviary, and I have never heard him sing again. Perhaps the birds
in the street shamed him out of it.
My sparrows have mostly been good sparrows, and as a class
have not been greater fighters than other birds. I have observed
them in the aviary and out of it, and have rarely seen them chase or
annoy smaller birds. In the city, goldfinches, robins, some warblers,
purple finches, and song-sparrows came about the roof-veranda,
and talked to the birds inside the netting, and sometimes my
canaries go out and fly about, but the sparrows never interfere with
them.
On my farm the sparrows were equally good. They never injured
the tiny wild birds that came for food, but fed peaceably with them.
On neighboring farms sparrows were known to tear swallows’ nests
to pieces, but they never molested my swallows, though they built
close to our house doors. I think possibly the reason lay in the
abundance of food scattered about. The little rogues knew that there
was enough for them summer and winter. They understood that I
liked them, and they did not harm my other pets.
 They are most intelligent birds. Living by their wits has developed
them amazingly. In Paris I used to be interested with their
discrimination in the matter of making friends. An elderly man who
fed a flock in the Tuileries Gardens had gained the confidence of
every member of it. They would not come to strangers, but when he
called “Jeanne! Pierre!” and the rest of their names, each bird would
fly to him in turn.
I had a great affection for the skimming swallows about my farm,
and often watched them as they caught flies or went to the low
ground for mud for their interesting nests. I was very sorry to find
that many of these graceful swallows suffered as much from
parasites as other wild birds I had known.
One case, on a farm near me, was quite painful for the sufferers.
A window in a carriage-house loft had been left open, and a pair of
old swallows, finding the rafters a secluded place, built a fine mud
nest against them. When the young ones were hatched they were
visited every day by the farmer’s wife, who grieved to find them
attacked by fat worms that mostly crawled into their ears. These
worms were half an inch long, had no hair, but possessed
rudimentary feet like a caterpillar’s, that were only visible under a
microscope. One worm penetrated a young bird’s nostril so far that
only a tiny piece of his body was visible. Enough remained in sight to
seize upon, but his forced exit from the nostril was followed by a
gush of blood. The sore place soon got well, and the other young
swallows also recovered after their ears were cleaned out.
The kind-hearted mistress of the farm destroyed this mud nest,
made a new one of excelsior and wool, put the little swallows in it,
and the parents, far from being frightened by this radical change in
their environment, went on feeding their young ones, conducted
them out into the world beyond the carriage house, and came back
the next year to nest in the same place.
Two stories about the swallows interested me greatly. The first
one was to the effect that the robin was the bird who undertook to
teach the first swallow created how to build a nest. I could imagine
the fussy, nervous robin entering upon the task with great haste,
and it is said that she very quickly got out of patience. Every time
she opened her beak to tell the swallow how to choose her mud and
sticks, and how to shape the nest, the intelligent bird would say, “I
know that; I know that.” At last, and unfortunately when the nest
was only half finished, the robin became exasperated and flew away,
and from that day to this every swallow has to be content with a
partial home that often falls to pieces.
The second story was a Swedish one, and relates that when the
crucified Christ hung on the cross, a swallow kept flying back and
forth crying, “Svala! svala!”—comfort, comfort!
I do not believe in the increase of sparrows, and yet I bring up a
certain number of them every year. How can I refuse the children
who come to me with the tiny birds and say, “This is our sparrow,
please feed him. We will call in a few days to see how he is.”
“Children,” I often say falteringly, “if this is a sick sparrow, you
won’t blame me if I chloroform him?”
“Oh, no,” they always cheerfully reply, but unfortunately the
sparrow is rarely a sick sparrow. He is usually in the best of health,
and he opens his yellow-rimmed beak and stares trustingly at me,
and after I give him one meal my fate is sealed. I am nurse-in-chief
for many days, though a young sparrow, of all my birds, learns
soonest to feed himself. Life is sacred in the eyes of children, and
the way to get rid of sparrows is not by inciting boys and girls to
destroy them.
The whole department of bird and animal life should be under
supervision. We have too many cats and dogs, too many sparrows
and pigeons in our cities. The health of the citizens is the first
consideration. Each city should maintain bird-houses, and bird
reservations. If I can raise shy birds on a city veranda, why could not
more wild birds be raised in bird-houses in public gardens and
parks?
It would not be an easy matter to thin out the sparrows, or utterly
to destroy them, but it could be done, and our wild birds could be
enticed back, and less money and time be spent in fighting insect
pests. The birds’ little beaks will do more effective work than all our
spraying and tree-climbing.
 It must amuse the birds immensely to see big, clumsy mankind
trying to ferret out the gipsy moth, for example. The sparrows do
eat some insects’ eggs and larvæ, for I have seen them do it inside
and outside my aviary—but it is a hopeless task to try to defend
these poor little fellows—these “avian rats,” these “cosmopolitan
pests,” as ornithologists call them. I cannot dislike them nor call
them names. They are brave little birds, and when I throw open my
window on a cold winter morning, and see them waiting on the
opposite roofs for their breakfast, and reflect that they alone of all
the summer birds are left to us in the city, I cannot deal harshly with
them.
Under a certain tree, is emptied each day a certain amount of
grain, no more no less, and it is put there whether I am at home or
not. Birds like to know what to depend on. They don’t want to be
fed spasmodically any more than we do. All day the sparrows flutter
about the house. As far as I can make out we have a flock of sixty or
seventy in our neighborhood. When night comes they tuck
themselves away under the house-eaves, getting near the chimneys
if they can. When the time comes to exterminate them I will help. In
the meantime I do not see what good it would do to carry on an
unsystematic and shocking killing of the helpless young ones—the
pets of my children friends.
 CHAPTER XXV
A MOTHER CAREY’S CHICKEN

Perhaps the strangest pet I had in my aviary was a black bird that
was brought to the door one evening by a boy. He said that a young
man had picked up this pigeon on the common, and had told him to
bring it to me. I found that it was a sooty-looking bird, with a tubular
bill and white feathers at the end of its tail—evidently a Mother
Carey’s chicken—that had probably been flying across the peninsula
on which the city of Halifax is built, and had dropped in exhaustion. I
saw that it was ill, and as soon as I could, hurried to the fish market
and interviewed an old sailor who had fished on the banks of
Newfoundland. He told me that flocks of these petrels used to follow
his ship, eating the fish livers that were thrown overboard and that
floated for days behind them. He had no liver on hand, but he gave
me a whiting, for he said that fish would also float on the water.
I knew nothing about these deep-sea matters—I only know
Mother Carey’s chickens by seeing them follow Atlantic steamers;
but finding that the petrel would not eat the whiting, I went back to
the sailor and got some liver that he had managed to secure for me.
The petrel would not eat this either, so I called my sister and
asked her to kindly get out our feeding-sticks. After cutting up pieces
of the liver she took them one by one on her sticks and dropped
them into the bird’s long bill that I held open for her. After a meal
was over I wiped his face and put him on the floor, and he scuttled
under the radiator. One day I put him in a bath, but he went right
under the water, and I had to take him out.
He never fed himself, and three times a day we got out our sticks
and the fish liver. He was gentle but feeble, and was more lively at
night than during the day.
When displeased he made a peeping noise, and at all times he
possessed a strong and peculiar smell.
 I had him for three weeks, and for a time he improved, and would
fly low over the floor, ascending and descending as if going over
waves of the sea.
I hoped that he would soon get entirely well, so that I might give
him his liberty, but he suddenly became very ill and died, regretted
on account of his gentle disposition.
We photographed him before losing him, and found him a good
bird to pose. Some of our birds were most aggravating when they
saw a camera. They were not afraid of it, but they acted like
naughty children, getting behind it and under it, and everywhere but
in front of it. Many an hysterical laugh have we had when, time after
time, just as a successful group of birds, dogs, cats, or hens had
been placed in good position, half our pets would get up and saunter
away.
At last the sight of the camera produced such a state of merriment
in the family that my sister, who had infinite patience with our pets,
would send us all away, and manage the four and two-footed
creatures alone.
In speaking of unmanageable pets, I must make honorable
mention of our fox terrier Billy, who was with the birds so much that
he might almost be called an inhabitant of the aviary. He did not
love the birds—he was jealous of them—but he never harmed them
and, moreover, they knew he would not harm them, and had no fear
of him. He never played with them, but he would wallow with Sukey
in the accumulation of scraps, seeds, grass, and other rubbish on
sweeping days in the aviary, until I have seen the maid gently push
them both aside with her broom.
Billy would cheerfully pose when he saw a camera, and follow us
whenever we went to the photographers in the town. One day when
my mother was having her picture taken, Billy placed himself at her
feet. The photographer took him up and lifted him to what he
considered a more attractive position.
I shall never forget the look of doggish reproach that Billy gave
him as he walked back to his original position, and held it. It seemed
to say, “Don’t you know, sir, that I am a dog that is used to posing? I
know how to show off my good points better than you do.”
 Strangers sometimes remarked that no member of our family was
photographed without this pet dog.
“We cannot help it,” we used to reply, “Billy follows us and gets
into the picture. We can’t keep him out.”
Dear little dog! He was the last of the real animals in “Beautiful
Joe,” to leave us, and a year ago, at the age of sixteen years and a
half, lay down one day to die, as calmly and peacefully as he had
lived.
 CHAPTER XXVI
SWEET-SWEET AND THE SAINT OF THE AVIARY

Among the books that I bought when I started my aviary was one
that amused me immensely. It was a clever book, but the description
of each bird almost always began with the assertion that this
particular bird was the best, the brightest, and the prettiest bird of
the entire race of birds.
I have not had the variety of birds described in that book, but now
that I am attempting to relate the particulars of some of my pets, I
find myself tempted to ascend up to the same heights of eulogy.
Each bird is the best bird. Each one is the most beautiful, the most
lovable—one has to exercise self-restraint to avoid exaggeration.
I have had quite a large number of birds that I cannot write about
at length. I will merely mention some of them.
I one day expressed a wish to have some bluejays in the presence
of a bird-fancier, and shortly afterward he arrived with a pair that he
had bought from a woman near Halifax, in one of the colored
settlements composed of descendants of Southern Negroes. They
were handsome birds, and as I released them in the aviary I could
not help thinking that if they were foreigners how greatly they would
be sought after.
Their appearance in the aviary occasioned the greatest
consternation among some of my birds, whose instinct recognized in
them hereditary enemies. This instinct of fear in these partly
domesticated birds is the same that makes them cower when a
hawk passes over their cages.
One indigo bunting fainted and fell motionless on the ground. I
took her upstairs where she would not see them, and the other birds
soon quieted down, for the blue jays went into a corner and stayed
there, only occasionally uttering harsh, unhappy cries.
 I wondered how they had ever contented themselves in a small
cage with the colored woman, if they were so unhappy in my aviary.
I begged them to have patience, that there were fires in the forests
about the city, and as soon as they were extinguished I would set
my prisoners free.
Finally a bright morning came, when I put them outside the
window, and they flew swiftly away, and I hope are living happily in
my beautiful native land.
Shortly after they left me, a small boy arrived at our door with a
tiny cage, scarcely suitable for a canary.
“I heard you had a pair of bluejays you don’t want,” he remarked
composedly, “and I thought I would take them and keep them in this
cage.”
I tried to make him view this proposition from the bluejays’ point
of view, and embraced the occasion of preaching again the doctrine
that it is a cruel thing for a boy to rob a bird’s nest, or confine a bird
in a cage. Also, that I wanted no eggs from nests, and no nestlings,
except those that had wandered far from their parents, and who
would starve if left to themselves.
I found no trouble in getting boys to understand this. Boys and
girls are just what the grown people make them. If we are kind to
birds they will imitate us.
Among the small birds that I have owned were some interesting
native siskins, that I found languishing downtown in a tiny cage one
hot August day. I bought them, and the delight of these wild birds
on getting into roomy quarters was very touching.
They flew at once to the spruce and fir trees, and began eating
their tips. Subsequently I gave them their liberty, and they raced
each other to the tops of the tallest trees they could find.
A smaller bird than the siskin was a tiny, yellow warbler whose
eyes seemed unnaturally large for the size of its body. A little girl
brought it to me one morning, closely folded in her moist hands.
“It is a weeny thing,” she said in an awed voice. “I saw it in our
stable. It would not go away, so I walked up to it and put my hands
over it, for I was afraid pussy would get it.”
 “It is one of the many warblers in this neighborhood,” I said.
“They often come to the wire netting and talk to my birds. I will take
good care of it.”
I intended to release the little creature as soon as he got rested,
but he became so tame and followed me about with such
unmistakable devotion shining from his dark eyes that I could not
bear to part from him.
Sweet-Sweet I named my new pet, and one Sunday morning I
was inexpressibly grieved to find that I had accidentally struck the
little fellow as he came too near me.
I picked him up and sprinkled water on him whenever he had a fit
or seizure, in which he either lay still or fluttered wildly to and fro. I
did not go to church, but devoted myself to poor Sweet-Sweet, and
encouraged him to eat when he came out of his spasms. By night-
time he was almost well, and next day had quite recovered.
Unfortunately, and to my very great surprise, my bird with the
melting eyes was a great fighter, and would attack birds so much
larger than himself that I trembled for his safety. He was not nearly
so large as my canaries, but he would fight any of them with the
greatest intrepidity.
I really should have allowed this little beautiful but mischievous
bird to fly away when the autumn came, but I had grown so much
attached to him and he was so much at home in the aviary that I
could not make up my mind to let him go. I also had a little curiosity
to see whether I could keep a warbler all winter.
He got on nicely until one unfortunate day, when he made up his
bird mind to bully one of my Japanese robins.
I have never found these robins quarrelsome, but this one deeply
resented Sweet-Sweet’s interference with the rapid tenor of his way.
I was just wondering what I should do with my naughty warbler, for
I knew his gay, impatient spirit would fret itself to death in a cage,
when one day I found that the Japanese bird had flown into a rage
with him, and had almost torn him to pieces.
I was shocked—I can hardly express the short, sharp pain I felt,
when I picked up that tiny, beloved bird body. Only a bird, but how
dear! If I had only let him fly away with the other yellow warblers to
some fair southern land! I selected two of the greenish-yellow
feathers, crossed them, and put them in my bird diary with the
mournful entry of his death.
Sweet-Sweet had been a worse fighter than any English sparrow I
ever saw, and a worse bully and fighter than Sweet-Sweet, was
another small bird I possessed for years—a brilliant red, blue, and
gold nonpareil.
He was not brilliant when I got him. I had seen pictures of
nonpareils, and had asked a bird-dealer to get me a pair. He sent
them to me one cold winter evening, and to my dismay, on opening
the birds’ traveling-cages I found that one of them was diseased, his
red neck being bare of feathers.
I wrote the bird-dealer an indignant letter, reproving him for
sending a sick bird on a journey, and telling him that I never again
would buy a bird from him. The proper way, of course, to discourage
the traffic in birds is not to buy them. This dealer probably cared
little for my remonstrance.
I put this little sufferer at once into a large cage, with fresh seeds
and water. He had a succession of fits, and tumbled and fluttered
about his cage. However, in between the fits he would eat and drink,
while I sat admiring his courage. When bedtime came he heroically
mounted a perch and sat there, so weak that he rocked to and fro
for a long time before his little claws got a firm grip of the perch.
Finally he was able to put his head under his wing, or back of his
wing, as I always wish to say, and went to sleep.
When I read bird stories as a child I always fancied that a bird put
the head under the side of the wing next the breast, whereas he
reaches back and tucks the head behind the wing. The position looks
uncomfortable, but I suppose the bird knows best about that.
As I have said before, I was disappointed in the appearance of
these dull, olive-green nonpareils. They were young ones, and I had
to wait three years for them to become like the beautiful birds in my
books, with the violet heads and necks, the partly red and partly
green backs.
They are natives of Mexico and Central America, and rarely get
farther north than northern Illinois and Kansas. They used to be
trapped in great numbers and shipped to the Northern States, there
to languish in captivity. They are partly insectivorous birds, and miss
their accustomed diet in cage life. If canaries required insect food
they never would have become the highly domesticated birds that
they are.
I put my sick nonpareil into the cage with a Java sparrow that was
also out of condition. I scarcely thought the new-comer would live
through the night, but my mother, who is an early riser, called out to
me in the morning that the little Southerner was as “pert” as
possible.
I had a hard time with him, as I had also with Java. They both lost
all their feathers. The nonpareil was the worst looking bird I ever
saw. I called him Baby, and he was soon a naked, skinny, scaly-
legged baby, with nothing attractive about him but his soft, dewy
eyes. I kept him and Java oiled and secluded in my study. They were
not ugly to me, but strangers were apt to burst into peals of
laughter at sight of their featherless bodies.
Every night I woke them up about eleven o’clock to take a late
supper, for they became rather indifferent about their food, though
apparently they did not suffer. I dreaded the long winter nights for
them in their enfeebled condition. Java became very tame, and
when I tapped the cage and said, “Come out for a walk,” he would
hop all around the room. Of course, there was no flying for either of
them in their condition.
Everything passes with time, and in a few months my birds’
purplish-red bodies became dark in hue, then crowds of downy pin-
feathers jostled each other. In a short time my hideous little pets
were, one, the exquisitely-hued nonpareil, the other the modest gray
and white sparrow, with feathers overlapping so smoothly that he
looked like a carved bird.
I regret to say his prosperity, instead of sweetening Baby’s
disposition, soured it, and when I put him into the aviary he speedily
took to himself the rôle of persecutor. He was so small that he could
not do much harm, but he used to fight continually, often in a very
amusing fashion.
 One day I saw him attack a fawn-colored, foreign finch that we
called the Widow. She was eating seeds from a box, and Baby tried
to push her away. The Widow bit him and would not yield. Then
Baby seized her tail and pulled it. She did not seem to mind this, so
he pulled harder. Then, as she was still indifferent, he fell upon her
and gave her a beating and forced her to leave him in possession of
the field. This was not serious, but the naughty Baby progressed in
wickedness, and finally whipped a timid canary so violently that she
died, and also struck a Bengalese finch a blow that was the cause of
his death. Bullying was bad enough, but this was murder, so at last I
kept the bad little nonpareil in my room the most of the time. He
perched on a cage in the wall near my mirror, and seemed to take a
certain amount of satisfaction in being with me. He lived for several
years, and only died a few months ago. I noticed one day that he
seemed very much excited, and leaving my room flew into other
bedrooms—a thing he rarely did. One morning a little later I found
him lying motionless on the floor. His little mischievous life was over,
and I was sorry for it, for when he was good he was “very, very
good.”
The saint of the aviary is little Blue Boy, the indigo bunting, alive
yet, and prosperous, though I have feared for his life again and
again. I never saw him strike a bird. I never saw him do anything
naughty. He is quiet and gentle in his habits, never interferes with
the other little birds, gets up early, waits patiently for his food till
others have finished, retires to quiet corners and sings his little
tinkling songs, goes to bed betimes, and if it is a warm moonlight
night, is apt to wake up three or four times and sing to himself, not
loudly, but loudly enough to cheer any light sleeper.
Indigo Bunting
Page 260
 He never chose a mate. He never seemed to want one. He is the
most quiet, self-contained, meek little bird imaginable. If any bird
chases him he flies to his little box in my room. The only thing he
begs for is a cockroach. He will hop toward me in the morning with a
pleading expression, if I have not one of the most unprepossessing
members of the beetle tribe for him.
At one time I started cockroach culture in a companion box to that
of the meal-worms. My mother was resigned, but doubtful about the
experiment, and I noticed that the cockroaches all fell victims to
some sudden calamity during one of my absences from home.
However, by diligent search, we can usually find two or three
around the hot-water pipes at night, and the maid I have taking care
of the birds, writes me that she tries hard to get “a Cockroach every
Night for the Little Blue Bird.”