276 GRAY LADY AND THE BIRDS 
kept cage birds like every one else; it was not because 
I was cruel, simply that I had never thought of the 
matter any more than my friends, until one day, being 
ill and shut in my room, like poor old Ned in the hospital, 
I watched the fluttering of a Painted Bunting or Non- 
pareil that my father had bought me. 
“This bird is one of the southern Sparrows, in size no 
larger than a Chippy. Its plumage is tropical in its 
beauty, deep blue head and neck, red underparts, glis- 
tening green back, green-and-red wings, with a reddish 
tail; in short, a glittering opal copied in feathers. Its 
cage was roomy, and it had the best of food, and fresh 
water for bathing and drinking, while the shelf in the 
window, on which it stood, was filled with flowering plants, 
up through the branches of which it could look. But, 
oh, the expression of that bird’s body! I watched its 
every motion; the head thrown backward, searching in 
vain for a loophole of escape between the bars, the 
quivering of its wings as the impulse for freedom, and 
the company of its kind, swept over it! Sometimes, 
late in the night, when I awoke and looked toward it, 
I could see that it was awake and its wings trembling 
with the thought of dawn that it could not fly to meet. 
Then I knew, even if it became cowed, and forgot its 
natural instincts so far as to be dumbly content as a 
prisoner, that the real life of the bird would be as dead 
as if a bullet had ended it, and though it was late winter, 
February, I felt that I must give it liberty. 
“T told my father, and he sympathized with me as usual, 
listened to my story, and then, packing the cage safely, 
had it sent by special express to a family friend, who was 
