I was quite afraid of him at first, for ever since my experience with the wicked schoolboys who clubbed us in the linden trees, and my later experience with Joe, I disliked boys very much.

[Illustration:  The Bobolink.]

When John Charles had bidden Eliza “good-morning” and tipped his hat again and the door closed after him, she said to me:  “Why, Dickey, that was a new kind of a boy!  He never once tried to hurt you or to scare you.  It shows that all boys are not rough, and I shall always like John Charles, for he is a little gentleman.”

To this sentiment I fully agreed, and I thought, “Alas! why are not all boys as gentle as John Charles?”

In a few hours I felt as much at home with Eliza as if I had always lived there, and I was much pleased when I heard her tell Katharine at the supper table the next evening how much she had enjoyed having me with her.

“A bird is ever so much better company than a clock,” she said; “though when I’m here by myself I always like to hear the clock tick.  It seems as if I were not so entirely alone.  But a bird is better.  I talked to Dickey to-day and he twittered back.  He has such a cute way of perking his little head to one side just as knowing as you please, and he acts exactly as if he were considering whether he should answer ‘yes’ or no’ to what I say, and then it is such fun to watch him smooth down his feathers.  He washes and irons them so nicely and works away as industriously as if he were afraid he’d lose his ‘job.’”

Miss Katharine rose from the table and stuck a lump of sugar for me to taste between the wires of my cage.

“I am surrounded by poor dead birds in the store all day,” she observed, “and spend so much of my time sewing their wings and heads and tails on hats and sort boxfuls of them for customers to look at, that even a living bird saddens me.”

“Yes, it must be very depressing.  What a shame to kill them; they are so cute and pretty and such happy little creatures!  See how cunning he looks nibbling at that sugar,” and the sister joined Miss Katharine in watching me.

“But do you know, Kathy, I don’t believe that women would continue wearing bird trimmings if they stopped a minute to think about it.  It doesn’t seem wrong to them because they never considered the question.  They simply haven’t thought about it at all.”

“Somebody set the fashion and they all followed like a flock of sheep,” answered the other with a sneering laugh.

“Yes, that’s just the way.  They go along without thinking.  They only know it is the style, and they don’t stop to inquire whether it can be indulged in innocently or hurtfully.  Now I believe that if their attention was particularly called to it, the most of them would quit it.”

Miss Katharine brightened into a smile and half unclasped her little satchel.