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BIBD8 IN A VILLAGE. 
bone and muscle and fibre, every feather and scale, 
is instinct with an energy which you cannot satisfy, 
and which is like an eternal hunger. Chain it by 
the feet, or place it in a cage fifty feet wide — in 
either case it is just as miserable. The illimitable 
fields of thin cold air, where it outrides the winds 
and soars exulting beyond the clouds, alone can 
give free space for the display of its powers and 
scope to its boundless energies. Nor to the power 
of flight alone, but also to a vision formed for 
sweeping wide horizons, and perceiving objects at 
distances which to short-sighted man seem almost 
miraculous. Doubtless, eagles, like men, possess 
some adaptiveness, else they would perish in their 
enforced inactivity, swallowing without hunger and 
assimilating without pleasure the cold coarse flesh 
we give them. A human being can exist, and even 
be tolerably cheerful, with limbs paralyzed and 
hearing gone; and that, to my mind, would be 
a parallel case to that of the eagle deprived of its 
liberty and of the power to exercise its flight, vision, 
and predatory instincts. 
As I sit writing these thoughts, with a cage 
containing four canaries on the table before me, 
I cannot help congratulating these little prisoners 
on their comparatively happy fate in having been 
born, or hatched, finches and not eagles. And yet, 
albeit I am not responsible for the restraint which 
