A LINNET FOR SIXPENCE. 
7 
his flower-pot, opening his bright eyes at the light; I 
then wished there had been some passage between us— 
some means of communicating the glad tidings of his 
approaching liberation, so that these last hours of his 
imprisonment might be lightened. But passage there 
was none ; and in the morning I found him dead and cold, 
at the foot of his perch, under the fern. 
Poor little brown bird in his modest winter dress, which 
would never now be changed for that brighter spring 
plumage his fellows would get in another month—the 
chestnut mantle and brilliant carmine vest. I had counted 
at first on his dying, but he had lived longer than is usually 
the case, and the wish had come, and with it the hope, to 
give him back to nature. Arrived at Worthing, my thought 
was, 1 would go out at once by Broadwater to the Downs 
and to Cissbury Hill, and on those long gorse-grown slopes 
that look towards the sea I would perhaps find a flock of 
wild linnets. The first sound of their tender airy twittering 
would reach him in his little cardboard prison and make 
him mad with desire to escape and be with them. That 
would be the moment to set him free; then how delightful 
it would be to watch his flight, to see him among his own 
little social people once more, free to use his wings under 
that wide sky. 
This pleasure being denied me, there was nothing left 
for me to do but to put the little dead bird in a small box to 
take it with me on my trip to the cdast ; for it seemed to 
