The bird did not belong to our family, nor had I ever met any of his relatives before, but that made but little difference.  He was a bird, and that was enough.  We did not wait for any formal introduction; but as he balanced himself on the edge of my cage he hurriedly told me news of the woods, and how he wished I might get free and come to live there.  He told of the lovely dragon flies, with purple, burnished wings that floated in the forest, mingling their drowsy hum with the chirping of the birds.  He told of the great mossy carpet spread under the trees; how at set of day the owls came out, and the moles rustled in the fallen leaves, and the frogs raised their evening hymn to the sinking sun.

I could have listened for hours to the sweet familiar tale my feathered brother told of life in the happy woodland, but Betty’s mother suddenly hurrying out to the pump to fill her bucket, cut short the story, and away my bird friend skimmed out of sight without so much as saying “good-bye.”  Though I saw him several times after that, he never came so close again.

“Oh, what heaps and heaps of fireflies!” exclaimed Betty, as she unhooked my cage to move me into the house that evening.  “It looks as if our door-yard was full of moving lanterns.”

“Nothin’ but lightnen bugs!” said Joe contemptuously.  “Here, see me catch ’em,” and in a few minutes he showed her a handful which he had killed by crushing between his hands.

“Hold on, I want to catch some too!” and hustling me into the kitchen, Betty ran along with him and was soon engaged in catching and killing the beautiful fireflies.

CHAPTER IX

THE HUNTERS

Song birds, plumage birds, water fowl, and many innocent birds of prey, are hunted from the everglades to the Arctic Circles for the barbaric purpose of decorating women’s hats.  The extent of this traffic is simply appalling.—­G.  O. Shields.

When Joe and his father came back from their gunning expeditions, the accounts they gave of the day’s slaughter made me very homesick and miserable, and wore sadly on my spirits in my captivity.

The heartless indifference with which the woman would ask her husband if it had been “a good day for killings,” almost made me wail aloud.

“Best kind of luck; I bagged nearly a hundred this trip,” he replied exultingly, one night when she put the usual question.  “The birds were as thick as blackberries in the high weeds along the creek, and were havin’ a mighty good time stuffing themselves with seeds.  Joe fired the old gun to start ’em and, great Jerushy! in a minute the sky was dark with ’em; I just blazed away and they dropped thick all around us, and it kept us tol’ble busy for a while a pickin’ ’em up.”

“Pop, tell ’em about the old water bird down in the swamp,” said Joe with a wicked laugh.

“Yes, tell us; what was it, pop?” urged Betty.