88 What Birds Have Done With Me 



stamps the caste of Vere de Vere. They were 

 three in a pen but not three of a kind, and though 

 Canada did not seem conscious of their existence, 

 there is some limit to what can be expected of 

 good breeding and it may allowably escape what 

 has become unendurable. Canada escaped from 

 Bildad and his silly Goose of a wife. Knowing 

 the difficulty of holding such opposite elements 

 together, I was not greatly surprised and told 

 the man to release the other two Geese, but to 

 make no attempt to recapture Canada. 



Now came a great surprise, we being thor- 

 oughly convinced that Minerva should have had a 

 Wild Goose wild, mind you instead of an owl 

 as emblematical of Wisdom, and having been 

 taught to believe that the distance between Cap- 

 tivity and Freedom is a million times the length 

 of the road between here and Tipperary, I 

 found myself nonplused, dumbfounded when con- 

 fronted by Canada strolling about the lawn quite 

 to the manor born and just as though nothing 

 had happened. She finally took up a position 

 on the public road, three feet from the wagon 

 track and not only rested her plump breast upon 

 good old Mother Earth but put her confiding head 

 under her wing and pretended to be asleep. Lobo, 

 a curious Collie puppy, saw nothing feigned in 

 her attitude and attempting a close acquaintance 

 found her cruelly wide awake and endowed with 



