XII 
THE KINGBIRD 
As a very small boy I spent much time in a 
certain piece of rather low ground partly grown 
up to bushes. Here in early spring I picked 
bunches of pretty pink and white flowers, which 
I now know to have been anemones. In the 
same place, a month or two later, I gathered 
splendid red lilies, and admired, without gather- 
ing it, a tiny blue flower with a yellow centre. 
This would not bear taking home, but was al- 
ways an attraction to me. I should have hked 
it better still, 1 am sure, if some one had been 
kind enough to tell me its pretty name — blue- 
eyed grass. 
Here, also, I picked the first strawberries of 
the season and the first blueberries. They were 
luxuries indeed. A “ gill-cup” full of either of 
them was good pay for an hour’s search. 
In one corner of the place there were half a 
dozen or so of apple-trees, and on the topmost 
branches of these there used to perch continually 
two or three birds of a kind which some older 
