business. It was an old-fashioned basket, with openwork sides and bottom, airy 

 and clean. Now, had this basket been a box instead, we should have had no 

 tragedy to record; or had the mesh been closely woven, no fatal mistake (though 

 well meant) would have darkened the sky of this domestic affair. But alas! the 

 truth must be told, since the biography we are writing admits of no reservations. 



It all came about by the interference of the father bird, whose presence in 

 the nursery should have been forbidden at the start. The mother was more 

 than once alarmed by his activity and misapplied zeal about the nest, and she 

 had scolded him away with emphatic tones. 



Not having anything of importance to do save to eat all day and sleep all 

 night, he was on the alert for employment. One dreadful morning, when the 

 mother was attending to breakfast, this father canary espied some tatters stick- 

 ing out of the bottom meshes of the nest basket, bits of string ends and threads, 

 carelessly and innocently overlooked. 



"Ah," thought he, "here is something that ought to be attended to at once." 



And he went to work! He thrust his sharp beak up between the round 

 meshes of the basket bottom and pulled at every thread he could lay hold of, 

 struggling beneath, fairly losing his foothold in his eagerness to pull them out. 

 Having succeeded in dragging most of the material from beneath the birdlings, 

 he caught sight of a few more straight pink strings lying across the meshes, and 

 began tugging at them. The mother, feeding the babies from the edge of the 

 nest above, noticed the little ones each in its turn crouching farther and farther 

 into the bottom of the cradle, faintly opening their mouths as if to cry, but 

 being too young and weak to utter a sound. It was a mystery, but the deepest 

 mystery of it all was the fact that little Dicky, the dwarf of the family, came to 

 the top as the rest worked down, and was getting more than his share of the 

 breakfast. 



About this time the mistress of the canary-cage came to see after her pets, 

 and beheld a sight which made her scream as hard as if she had seen a mouse. 

 There, beneath the nest, was the father bird tugging at protruding feet and legs 

 of baby birds with all his might, growing more and more excited as he saw his 

 supposed strings resisting his attempts to pull them through. • 



When the affair was looked into, there was but one bird left alive of the 

 five little infants no more than five days old, and they were released from their 

 predicament to have a decent burial in the garden at the foot of a motherly- 

 looking cabbage head that stood straight up in disgust of the cruel affair, "as 

 if she would ever have such a thing happen to her little cabbages!" True, she 

 had no little cabbages of her own, but that made no difference. 



Now that we have tucked away these four little canary-birds, who never 

 saw the light of day, and therefore never could realize what they missed by not 

 holding on harder to what little they had by way of feet and legs, we will drop the 

 painful subject and attend to Dicky. 



Of course the father bird was excluded from the nursery, as he should 

 have been weeks before, and there was only one mouth to feed. And that mouth 



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