Vermont Bird Club 17 



the initiated is it given to interpret them, but always his various calls 

 are responsive and significant. He kisses prettily; putting up his bill 

 and giving a dainty little peck; though to me the experience is a good 

 deal like kissing a carpet tack. Then he cuddles under my chin. I 

 close my eyes. He closes his eyes. I peep and he peeps and seems 

 thoroughly to enjoy this game of hide and seek. From the first he has . 

 manifested this spirit of camaraderie and has never learned to flock 

 by himself, but cries complainingly if left alone. After a little, a 

 large cage was hung in a vine-shaded window. In it tempting food 

 was placed and gradually he was beguiled therein — and the door was 

 closed, In pathetic bewilderment he searched vainly for the door that 

 was and then was not. A Peri at the gates! He submitted, finally, 

 to the inevitable; but he had learned the universal lesson — the faith- 

 lessness of the human kind. He had been tricked and trapped, and 

 though loosed again, not for many a day would he come, as twilight 

 fell, to nestle on my shoulder, but when the lights came out he fled 

 swiftly to some high, dark refuge, and crouched silent and watchful, 

 resenting approach and capture with sharp nips and quite unseemly 

 language. This was the first dawning upon his bird mind of the un- 

 reliability of the human, and though reconciled now to occasional and 

 necessary captivity, the iron of suspicion has evidently entered his soul. 

 He trusts us with mental reservations, as if our tenderest advances 

 might conceal some ulterior and sinister motive. He has a singularly 

 measuring look with which he "sizes us up" and that gives one a 

 breathless, hoping, fearing, at-the-bar-of-judgment feeling, as if daring 

 the fiat of the elemental, — of generic love and faith and truth. At 

 night Pitty Babe is a fine example of the promptings of racial instinct; 

 striving restlessly for the highest branches of his ancestral tree; 

 springing upward from his topmost perch and bumping his head, un- 

 heeded against his cage. He has never forgotten his early life of 

 freedom on his native heath and gazes into the blue with fixed eye 

 and plaintive, moaning sound. 



He follows the flight of the pigeons with a cry that plainly says 

 "0, for the wings of a dove!" The first falling snow was a source of 

 surprise and perplexity. He watched the large fiakes fioat by as if 

 wondering whether they were a strange variety of insect or white- 

 winged birds fallen from a white bird-paradise in the skies. In May 

 he began moulting. With the loss of his feathers there fell upon him 

 a melancholy and loss of self-confidence. There is undeniable moral 



