214 
BIRDS IN A VILLAGE. 
many splendid faculties. The little bird twitters 
and sings in its cage, and among ourselves the 
blind man and the cripple whistle and sing too, 
feeling at times a lower kind of contentment and 
cheerfulness. The chaffinch in East London, with 
its eyeballs seared by red-hot needles, sings too 
in its prison, when it has grown accustomed to 
its darkened existence, and is in health, and the 
agreeable sensations that accompany health prompts 
it at intervals to melody ; but no person, not even 
the dullest ruffian among the baser sort of bird- 
fanciers, would maintain for a moment that the 
happiness of the little sightless captive, whether 
vocal or silent, is at all comparable in degree to 
that of the chaffinch singing in April " on the 
forest bough," vividly seeing the wide sunlit 
world, blue above and green below, possessing the 
will and the power, when its lyric ends, to trans- 
port itself swiftly through the crystal fields of 
air to other trees and other woods. 
I take it that in the lower animals misery can 
result from two causes only — restraint and disease ; 
consequently, that animals in a state of nature are 
not miserable. They are not hindered nor held 
back. Whether the animal is migrating, or burying 
himself in his hybernating nest or den ; or flying 
from some rapacious enemy, which he may or may 
not be able to escape; or feeding, or sleeping, or 
