Vek.mont Bird Club 21 



"Haven't you any manners? Youngsters now-a-days seem to have no 

 respect for their elders, at all!" 



He takes the hint with the rap and thereafter makes little darts 

 between "spoons," so to speak. 



His extreme interest in human affairs nearly proved his undoing. 

 for he one day slyly sipped a few drops of muriatic acid. An expres- 

 sion of having been struck by lightning passed over his features. We 

 gave him much milk and then alcohol and water — after frantically 

 calling up a drug store — and presently he began doing a cake walk in 

 his cage. He lifted his feet very high and carefully as if the floor 

 were coming up to meet him. He side-stepped. He eyed us vacantly 

 and foolishly. Finally he braced himself against the side of his cage, 

 sat down on his (then) stub of a tail, and with outstretched legs and 

 drooping head went suddenly to sleep. Notwithstanding his Puritan 

 upbringing he was hopelessly, emphatically — on a spree! For two 

 hours he slept; then he yawned, and with a "morning-after" look and 

 manner climbed unsteadily to his perch and put his head under his 

 wing. It was manifestly a case of intoxication — first offence. 



Undoubtedly his greatest accomplishment is a game of his own 

 invention. When his bath is set out he tears up bits of newspaper 

 and throws them into the water, watching his miniature boats sail 

 about till water-logged, when he pulls them out and throws in fresh bits. 



At this moment as I write he alights softly upon my desk to censor 

 this article, of which he apparently disapproves. For a moment he 

 holds an abstracted, statuesque pose; then, with malice aforethought, 

 he snatches the papers and scatters them far and wide. Pens and 

 pencils fly fast and faster, and his obvious attempts to distract my 

 attention will account for the evident hiatus in my narrative at this 

 point. 



Pitty Babe's future is problematical. Will it be the chloroform 

 and a final sleep or, if freed under his native vine and fig-tree, would 

 he, we had asked, grow self-reliant and migrate with his kind, leaving 

 us only a delightful memory of a vital, vivid, throbbing personality? 



I had never, in the two years and a half, opened an outer door 

 without first locating him at a safe distance, but one day as an arrow 

 from a bow a shadow darted past me, poised on the vines, and sailed 

 away into the high elm from whence a burst of robin melody fell upon 

 my astonished ears. Followed several anxious hours of callings, and 

 coaxings, trailing Pitty Babe from tree to tree. Twilight and a light 



