CARDINAL: MY FIRST CAGED BIRD 13 



Recently I had an experience of that kind on hearing 

 a loud glad bird note or call from overhead when w.iik- 

 ing in a London West-End thoroughfare. It made me 

 start and stand still; when, casting up my eyes, I caught 

 sight of the bird in its cage, hanging outside a first- 

 floor window. It was the beautiful cardinal of many 

 memories. 



This is a bird of the finch family of southern South 

 America — about the size of a starling, but more grace- 

 fully shaped, witli 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 hear- 

 ing, 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 tlie changes that time had wrought in me. And 

 he, my own cardinal, the first cardinal I ever knew, re- 

 membered it all even as I did — all the little incidents of 

 our life together; the whole history was in both our 

 minds at the 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 



