CARDINAL 13 



This is a bird of the finch family of southern South 

 America — about the size of a starling, but more 

 gracefully shaped, with a longer tail; the whole upper 

 plumage clear blue-grey, the underparts pure white; 

 the face, throat, and a high pointed crest an intense 

 brilliant scarlet. 



It had actually seemed to me at the moment of 

 hearing, then of seeing it, that the bird had recognised 

 me as one from the same distant country — that its 

 loud call was a glad greeting to a fellow-exile seen 

 by chance in a London thoroughfare. It was even 

 more than that: this was my own bird, dead so 

 many, many years, living again, knowing me again 

 so far from home, in spite of all the changes that 

 time had wrought in me. And he, my own cardinal, 

 the first cardinal I ever knew, remembered it all 

 even as I did — all the little incidents of our life 

 together; the whole history was in both our minds 

 at that same moment of recognition. 



I was a boy, not yet eight years old, when my 

 mother took me on one of her yearly visits to Buenos 

 Ayres. It was a very long day's journey for us in 

 those pre-railroad times; for, great and prosperous 

 as that city and republic now are, it was not so then, 

 when the people were divided, calling themselves 

 Reds and Whites (or Blues), and were occupied in 

 cutting one another's throats. 



In Buenos Ayres we stayed at the house of an 

 English missionary clergyman, in a street near the 

 waterside. He was a friend of my parents and used 

 to come out with his family to us in the summer, and 



