10 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



That was his way of blessing them. He was a 

 hardened 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 himself, but what he had been in the 

 past, in some unimaginably 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 " little birds," but addressed them affec- 

 tionately as fellow-mortals of diminutive size — " little 

 children of a thousand unvirtuous mothers " was 

 more nearly his expression. 



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 fighting years in 

 the Argentine Confederation, in the forties of the 

 last century, had become in some ways de-Italianized 



