CHAPTER IV 



HOME LIFE 



SHARP, ringing cries of alarm, then of terror, 

 coming from a pair of robins one morning in June, 

 caused me to drop my work suddenly, dash out of 

 doors and follow the sound through the garden, 

 across the lane tc a meadow where a vagrant cat, 

 with a now-or-never desperation, made a leap through 

 the grass even as I approached and, before my very 

 eyes, snapped up a baby robin in its cruel jaws. 

 With as frantic a leap upon the cat, I quickly pried 

 its jaws apart and released the limp and apparently 

 dead bird. Three other young robins, which had 

 fallen out of the same nest in the cherry tree when a 

 heavy thunder shower weakened its mud-plastered 

 walls the night before, were squatting dejectedly on 

 the ground, unable to fly. So I gathered them up in 

 my arms too, lest they fall a certain prey to the cat, 

 and deposited the little family in an improvised 

 flannel nest on a sunny upper balcony. 



One might have supposed that the parents would 

 find them here, within fifty yards of their cherry 

 tree home, and come to feed them. Strangely 

 enough, the old birds' cries of distress were the last 

 sign from either of them in the neighbourhood. 

 Did they flee the place in despair, thinking their 

 babies foully murdered by the cat and me ? After 

 waiting in vain for some response from them to the 



67 



