lo ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



ened 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 him- 

 self, but what he had been in the past, in some un- 

 imaginably remote period of his existence, a pure-hearted 

 child, capable of a glad, beautiful emotion and of tears. 



I will remark in passing that the actual words of his 

 blessing are hardly translatable; for he didn't call them 

 "Httle birds," but addressed them affectionately as fel- 

 low-mortals of diminutive size — "little children of a 

 thousand unvirtuous mothers" was more nearly his ex- 

 pression. 



One is reminded of a famous historical incident — of 

 the exclamation of the dying Garibaldi, when a small 

 bird of unrecorded species alighted for a moment on the 

 ledge of his open window, and burst out into a lively 

 twittering song. "Quanto e allegro!" murmured the old 

 passing fighter. The exclamation would have seemed 

 quite natural on the lips of a dying Englishman, but 

 how strange on his! Does it find an echo in the heart 

 of the people he liberated, who appreciate a bird not for 

 its soul-gladdening voice but for its flavour? It can 

 only be supposed that Garibaldi during his furious fight- 

 ing years in the Argentine Confederation, in the forties 

 of the last century, had become in some ways de-Italian- 

 ized — that he had been infected with a friendly feeling 

 towards birds of his fellow "pirates and ruffians" as 

 they were called, and of the people generally, from his 



