followed and tried to eoax her out. lie crei)t close, placed his hill a.^ainst hers 

 and tried to shove her out. But his loving eitorts were of no avail. If 1 re- 

 moved her. she immediately crej^it hack into that corner or some other. The hird 

 that 4S hours hefore was juhilan.tly happy and destroying hundreds of injurious 

 insects daily was now hroken hearted and sufTering the tortures of a painful 

 death. Mer mate, in addition to his own sutTerings, seemed to realize that she 

 nuist (lie. He snuggled up beside her and stroked her feathers affectionately with 

 his bill. Two human beings could not have expressed their despair, stif¥ering and 

 atiection more ])lainly than these feathered friends of man. T wanted to comfort 

 them but they could not understand. I could neither heal their bodies nor return 

 tlieir ha]i])iness. 



That night, the brown bird sat on a newspaper and the black one sat on the 

 edge of the nest. How long and sorrowful those hours must have been I 



The next morning, June 6th, they died ; the female at 8 o'clock and the 

 male at 9. 



Then the question arose, should we bury them or send them to a zoologist? 

 We nuist decide immediately because they w^ould not keep. We sent them away. 



The two remaining little birds possessed voracious but very fastidious appe- 

 tites. They required to be fed every fifteen minutes on perfectly fresh food. 

 Their little, pink mouths would pop out from under the feather cover, poised on 

 their long, slim throats. As they wavered about, they resembled pink flowers, 

 wind blown. A little mistake in diet w^ould make the birds droop. We could 

 find little else but angleworms and not much of them. We had to go to the 

 woods for them. We dug the garden over and re-dug it : then, dug it again and, 

 after that, several more times. Sundav, it was a regular forenoon job because 

 A\-orms saved over night made them sick. 



They usually had their first meal at 4:30 a. m. and their last one about 8 

 ]). m. Here is a specimen bill of fare for one day. Jtuie 7th. when they were 

 5 and 6 days old, 56 2-3 angleworms, 30 currant w'orms, 6 pupae, 13 large white 

 grubs, 2 wireworms, 1 large cutworm, > rosebugs, 4 sowbugs ; total, 117 2-3. And 

 the old 1)irds would have fed them more than that. 



Their appetites increased somewhat with their growth. The smaller one was 

 delicate and always received the choicest bits. Its feathers were black and were 

 hardlv out wdien it drooped and died at two weeks of age. 



The other bird, we named Chirk-chirk from her peculiar call. She finally, 

 refused angleworms entirely and developed a taste for bread and milk w'ith such 

 insects as we could obtain. She never knew what a cage was. She w^as out of 

 doors whenever we were. At other times and at night, she had a room of her 

 own. She was never too sleepy, no matter how dark the night, to call to me in 

 the sweetest little notes as I passed her room on my way to bed. If I stood near 

 her perch in the dark, she would answer as long as I talked to her. If I took 

 her on my finger, she would snuggle against my face and seem perfectly happy. 



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