126 CHIRPY, THE RUFFIAN. 
the street, and began to shout instructions, 
or advice, or imprecation, or warning, or all 
four, at the fighters. They were owners of 
nests, but goodness knows where they had all 
come from so suddenly! Chirpy bobbed from 
side to side, and yelled till he seemed in danger 
of having an epileptic fit, and old Cheer-up 
fairly danced with excitement. All up and 
down the street others were doing the same. 
The fight passed in a whirl of screaming 
brown fiends, and subsided as quickly as it 
had begun, leaving a scattered cloud of 
sparrows, all very much excited, in its train, 
and two sparrows on the ground. These 
were not excited at all, because they were 
dead, and lay there in the sun, silent and 
pathetic proofs that the fight had not been, 
as it appeared, all noise. 
Then Chirpy turned, and discovered that his 
wife had vanished in the confusion. Now, 
sparrows have their own ideas about their 
wives leaving their nest while eggs are in the 
course of hatching—possibly with good reason 
—and their own way, which is not ours, of 
ordering them back again. Chirpy’s wings 
fairly whirred as he set off in pursuit. He 
must have known more or less where to find 
her, for he streaked into and out of every tree, 
all up and down the garden, over to the stables, 
