“‘I’d like to break every bone in your ugly body,’ muttered the sailor, with a glance at the hunchback, who scowled in return.

“‘I shall die of this close street, and of all I have suffered,’ thought the thrush.

“‘Green leaves! green leaves!’ he sang, for it was the only song he knew.

“‘My voice is gone,’ thought the hunchback’s companion.  ’He’ll beat me again to-night; but it can’t last long: 

     “Love and truth,
     And joys of youth"’—­

she sang, for that was the song she had learned; and it was not her fault that it was inappropriate.

“But the ballad-singer’s captivity was nearly at an end.  When the hunchback left her that evening to spend the sailor’s penny with the few others which she had earned, he swore that when he came back he would make her sing louder than she had done all day.  Her face showed no emotion, less than it did when he saw it hours after, when beauty and feeling seemed to have returned to it in the peace of death, when he came back and found the cage empty, and that the long-prisoned spirit had flown away to seek the face of love and truth indeed.

“But how about the thrush?

“The sailor had scarcely swallowed the wrath which the hunchback had stirred in him, when his ear was caught by the song of the thrush above him.

“‘You sing uncommon well, pretty one,’ he said, stopping and putting his hat even farther back than usual to look up.  He was one of those good people who stop a dozen times in one street, and look at everything as they go along; whereby you may see three times as much of life as other folk, but it is a terrible temptation to spend money.  It was so in this instance.  The sailor looked till his kindly eye perceived that the bird was ill-cared for.

“‘It should have a bit of sod, it should,’ he said emphatically, taking his hat off, and scratching his head again; ’and there’s not a crumb of food on board.  Maybe, they don’t understand the ways of birds here.  It would be a good turn to mention it.’

“With this charitable intention he entered the house, and when he left it, his pocket was empty, and the thrush was carried tenderly in his handkerchief.

“‘The canary died last voyage,’ he muttered apologetically to himself, ‘and the money always does go somehow or other.’

“The sailor’s hands were about three times as large and coarse as those of the boy who had carried the thrush before, but they seemed to him three times more light and tender—­they were handy and kind, and this goes farther than taper fingers.