FEBRUARY. 
LITTLE INNOCENTS. 
ERY beautiful were the blue titmice. 
They were hanging upside-down from 
the lump of suet tied on the end of a piece of 
string suspended from a branch, which the 
kind old gentleman had put out for them, 
and they were all faint blue above and pale 
yellow below, and had white cheeks, and 
whizzed and hovered about the food like 
two gaily-coloured bees, while the bitter north 
wind roared round the other side of the house, 
and the frost still clung on the north side of 
the hedges. 
Not being able to crawl all over a thing 
upside-down like a mouse, or sidle gaily down 
a thin string on their heads, or any other end, 
or whir off and on to a lump of suet wildly 
cavorting in the breeze, the other birds—the 
robins, the thrushes, the wrens, the hedge- 
sparrows—could do no more than revile the 
acrobats from afar. 
But one hen-sparrow—blessed, or cursed, 
with the ingenious imitative faculties of her 
race—did make shift to get a hold somehow 
