298 CONCLUSION. 



ment. We had troubled ourselves the less about him, because he saw 

 daily, without any emotion, canaries, bullfinches, nightingales ; but 

 the sight of the nightingale threw him into an incredible transport of 

 fury. Passionate and intrepid, without heeding that the object of 

 his hate was twice his own size, he pounced on the cage with bill 

 and claws; he would fain have killed its inmate. The nightingale, 

 however, uttered cries of alarm, and called for help with a hoarse and 

 pitiful voice. The other, checked by the bars, but clinging with his 

 claws to the frame of an adjacent picture, raged, hissed, crackled (the 

 popular word petillait alone expresses his short, sharp cry), piercing 

 him with his glances. He said, in effect: — 



" King of song, what dost thou here? Is it not enough that in 

 the woods thy imperious and absorbing voice should silence all our 

 lays, hush our strains into whispers, and singly fill the desert ? 

 Yet thou comest hither to deprive me of the new existence which I 

 have found for myself, of this artificial grove where I perch all the 

 winter, a grove whose branches are the shelves of a library, whose 

 leaves are books ! Thou comest to share, to usurp the attention of 

 which I was the object, the reverie of my master, and my mistress's 

 smile ! Woe to thee ! I luas loved ! '' 



The robin does, in reality, attain to a very high degree of famili- 

 arity with man. The experience of a long winter proves to me that 

 he much prefers human society to that of his own kind. In our 

 absence he shares in the small talk of the birds of the aviary; but as 



