THE BOOK: AN APOLOGY 9 



yards wide, we sat down on the dry grass under a 

 large red willow. A flock of birds was in the tree — a 

 species of a most loquacious kind — but our approach 

 had made them silent. Not the faintest chirp fell 

 from the branches that had been full of their musical 

 jangle a few minutes before. It was a species of 

 troupial, a starling-like bird of social habits, only 

 larger than our starling, with glossy olive-brown 

 plumage and brilliant yellow breast. Pecho amarillo 

 (yellow breast) is its vernacular name. Now as soon 

 as we had settled comfortably on the grass the entire 

 flock, of thirty or forty birds, sprang up into the air, 

 going up out of the foliage like a fountain, then 

 suddenly they all together dropped down, and sweep- 

 ing by us over the water burst into a storm of loud 

 ringing jubilant cries and liquid notes. My com- 

 panion uttered a sudden strange harsh discordant 

 laugh, and turning away his sharp dry fox-like 

 face, too late to hide the sudden moisture I had seen in 

 his eyes, he exclaimed with savage emphasis on the first 

 word — "Curse the little birds — how glad they are!" 

 That was his way of blessing them. He was a 

 hardened rascal, utterly bad, feared and hated by 

 the poor, despised by his equals; yet the sight and 

 sound of that merry company, its sudden outburst 

 of glorious joy, had wrought an instantaneous change 

 in him that was like a miracle, and for a moment he 

 was no longer himself, but what he had been in the 

 past, in some unimaginably remote period of his 

 existence, a pure-hearted child, capable of a glad, 

 beautiful emotion and of tears. 



