60 What Birds Have Done With Me 



Of all the things with wings, they seemed the 

 most wonderful and farthest removed from the 

 common earth to which other creatures belonged, 

 and he was greatly shocked when Adolph told 

 him that "Ze woman, she use ze down to pretty 

 ze dress." Not long after this, at church, he saw 

 a very beautiful little girl wearing a blue merino 

 cloak, with a hood to match, trimmed with Swan's 

 down, and was not shocked, for some way she, 

 also, seemed a child of the white clouds. 



The cranes going by 'way up in the blue ether 

 with their weird cry, were things of the sky 

 and not of the earth. They undoubtedly had 

 wings but they did not seem to use them, but 

 were blown along the great currents of air, a 

 part of them, riding on their backs, with their 

 long legs stuck out behind to steer with, as idle as 

 the proverbial painted ship upon the painted 

 ocean. In later years, the small boy had to very 

 greatly revise his notion with regard to the crane 

 as a super-terrestrial creature, and it became not 

 only a creature of the earth, but of the low places 

 of the earth, the swamps, and marshes and dis- 

 mal fens, where slimy things crept and crawled 

 and hid in rank grass. Like some other things, 

 it became rather grotesque on close inspection, but 

 one of Nature's pet jokes all the same. Every 

 one, young and old, laughed at the ridiculous long 

 legs, and yet concealed in those same stilts, from 



