Besides that he gave them crumbs of coarse bread, crackers, lumps of sugar, cuttle-fish to peck at, and a number of other things.  Miss Laura did everything just as he told her; but I think she talked to the birds more than he did.  She was very particular about their drinking water, and washed out the little glass cups that held it most carefully.

After the canaries were clean and comfortable, Miss Laura set their cages in the sun, and turned to the goldfish.  They were in large glass globes on the window-seat.  She took a long-handled tin cup, and dipped out the fish from one into a basin of water.  Then she washed the globe thoroughly and put the fish back, and scattered wafers of fish food on the top.  The fish came up and snapped at it, and acted as if they were glad to get it.  She did each globe and then her work was over for one morning.

She went away for a while, but every few hours through the day she ran up to Carl’s room to see how the fish and canaries were getting on.  If the room was too chilly she turned on more heat; but she did not keep it too warm, for that would make the birds tender.

After a time the canaries got to know her, and hopped gayly around their cages, and chirped and sang whenever they saw her coming.  Then she began to take some of them downstairs, and to let them out of their cages for an hour or two every day.  They were very happy little creatures, and chased each other about the room, and flew on Miss Laura’s head, and pecked saucily at her face as she sat sewing and watching them.  They were not at all afraid of me nor of Billy, and it was quite a sight to see them hopping up to Bella, She looked so large beside them.

One little bird became ill while Carl was away, and Miss Laura had to give it a great deal of attention.  She gave it plenty of hemp seed to make it fat, and very often the yolk of a hard-boiled egg, and kept a nail in its drinking water, and gave it a few drops of alcohol in its bath every morning to keep it from taking cold.  The moment the bird finished taking its bath, Miss Laura took the dish from the cage, for the alcohol made the water poisonous.  Then vermin came on it, and she had to write to Carl to ask him what to do.  He told her to hang a muslin bag full of sulphur over the swing, so that the bird would dust it down on her feathers.  That cured the little thing, and when Carl came home, he found it quite well again.  One day, just after he got back, Mrs. Montague drove up to the house with a canary cage carefully done up in a shawl.  She said that a bad-tempered housemaid, in cleaning the cage that morning, had gotten angry with the bird and struck it, breaking its leg.  She was very much annoyed with the girl for her cruelty, and had dismissed her, and now she wanted Carl to take her bird and nurse it, as she knew nothing about canaries.

Carl had just come in from school.  He threw down his books, took the shawl from the cage and looked in.  The poor little canary was sitting in a corner.  It eyes were half shut, one leg hung loose, and it was making faint chirps of distress.