CARDINAL 13 



gracefully shaped, with 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 

 hearing, then of seeing it, that the bird had recog- 

 nised 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 the changes that 

 time had wrought in me. And he, my own cardinal, 

 the first cardinal I ever knew, remembered it all 

 even as I did — ^all the little incidents of our life 

 together ; the whole history was in both our minds 

 at that 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 were divided, calling themselves Reds and 

 Whites (or Blues), and were occupied in cutting one 

 another's throats. 



In Buenos Ayres we stayed at the house of an 

 English missionary clergyman, in a street near the 

 waterside. He was a friend of my parents and used 

 to come out with his family to us in the summer, and 

 in return my mother made his house her home for a 



