298 CONCLUSION. 
ment. We had troubled ourselves the less about him, because he saw 
daily, without any emotion, canaries, bullfinches, nightingales; but 
the sight of the nightingale threw him into an incredible transport of 
fury. Passionate and intrepid, without heeding that the object of 
his hate was twice his own size, he pounced on the cage with bill 
and claws; he would fain have killed its inmate. The nightingale, 
however, uttered cries of alarm, and called for help with a hoarse and 
pitiful voice. The other, checked by the bars, but clinging with his 
claws to the frame of an adjacent picture, raged, hissed, crackled (the 
popular word petillazt alone expresses his short, sharp cry), piercing 
him with his glances. He said, in effect:— 
“King of song, what dost thou here? Is it not enough that in 
the woods thy imperious and absorbing voice should silence all our 
lays, hush our strains into whispers, and singly fill the desert? 
Yet thou comest hither to deprive me of the new existence which I 
have found for myself, of this artificial grove where I perch all the 
winter, a grove whose branches are the shelves of a library, whose 
leaves are books! Thou comest to share, to usurp the attention of 
which I was the object, the reverie of my master, and my mistress’s 
smile! Woe to thee! I was loved!” 
The robin does, in reality, attain to a very high degree of famili- 
arity with man. The experience of a long winter proves to me that 
he much prefers human society to that of his own kind. In our 
absence he shares in the small talk of the birds of the aviary; but as 
