CHAPTER II 



Cardinal : the Story of My First Caged Bird 



A once familiar but long unheard sound coming 

 unexpectedly to us will sometimes affect the mind 

 as it is occasionally affected through the sense of 

 smell, restoring a past scene and state so vividly that 

 it is less like a memory than a vision. It is indeed 

 more than a vision, seeing that this is an illusion, 

 something apparently beheld with the outer or 

 physical eyes ; the other is a transformation, a return 

 to that state — that forgotten self — which was lost 

 for ever, yet is ours again ; and for a glorious moment 

 we are what we were in some distant place, some 

 long-vanished time, in age and freshness of feeling, in 

 the brilliance of our senses, our wonder and delight 

 at this visible world. 



Recently I had an experience of that kind on hearing 

 a loud glad bird-note or call from overhead when 

 walking in a London West-End thoroughfare. It 

 made me start and stand still ; when, casting up 

 my eyes, I caught sight of the bird in its cage, hanging 

 outside a first-floor window. It was the beautiful 

 cardinal of many memories. 



This is a bird of the finch family of southern South 

 America — about the size of a starling, but more 



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