THE LIFE OF BIRDS 139 
habit a fowl,’—that delinquent men must 
revisit earth as women, and delinquent women 
as birds. Malvolio thought nobly of the soul, 
and in no way approved his opinion ; but I re- 
member that Harriet Prescott, in her school- 
days, accepted this, her destiny, with glee. 
“When I saw the Oriole,” she wrote to me, 
“from his nest among the plum-trees in the 
garden, sail over the air and high above the 
Gothic arches of the elm, a stream of flashing 
light, or watched him swinging silently on pen- 
dent twigs, I did not dream how near akin we 
were. Or when a Hummingbird, a winged 
drop of gorgeous sheen and gloss, a living gem, 
poising on his wings, thrust his dark, slender, 
honey-seeking bill into the white blossoms of a 
little bush beside my window, I should have 
thought it no such bad thing to be a bird ; even 
if one next became a bat, like the colony in 
our eaves, that dart and drop and skim and 
scurry, all the length of moonless nights, in 
such ecstasies of dusky joy.” Was this weird 
creature, the bat, in very truth a bird, in some 
far primeval time ? and does he fancy, in unquiet 
dreams at nightfall, that he is one still? I won- 
der whether he can enjoy the winged brother- 
hood into which he has thrust himself, — vic- 
tim, perhaps, of some rash quadruped-ambition, 
— an Icarus, doomed forever not to fall. 
