hand, and in a few breathless seconds he was pecking at one and calling to the foolish, faithless lot of huddled hens in the bushes to come to him immediately.  First he called invitingly while I held my breath, and then he commanded as he scratched for lost crumbs in the white dust of the Riverfield ribbon, but the foolish creatures only huddled and squeaked, and at a few cautious steps I took in their direction, they showed a decided threat of vanishing forever into the woods.

“Oh, what will I do, Mr. G. Bird?” I asked in despair, with a real sob in my throat as I looked toward the family coach, from which I could hear a happy and animated discussion of Plato’s Republic going on between the two old gentlemen who had thirty years’ arrears in argument and conversation to make up.  I could see that no help would come from that direction.  “I can’t lose them forever,” I said again, and this time there was the real sob arising unmistakably in my voice.

“Just stand still, and I’ll call them to you,” came a soft, deep voice out of the forest behind me, and behold, a man stood at my side!

The man’s name is Adam.

“Now give me a cracker and watch ’em come,” he said, as he came close to my side and took a biscuit from my surprised and nerveless hand.  “Ah, but you are one beauty, aren’t you?” he further remarked, and I was not positively sure whether he meant me or the Golden Bird until I saw that he had reached down and was stroking Mr. G. Bird with a delighted hand.  “Chick, chick, chick!” he commanded, with a note that was not at all unlike the commanding one the Sultan had used a few minutes past, only more so, and in less than two seconds all those foolish hens were scrambling around our feet.  In fact, the command in his voice had been so forcible that I myself had moved several feet nearer to him until I, too, was in the center of my scrambling, clucking Bird venture.

I don’t like beautiful men.  I never did.  I think that a woman ought to have all the beauty there is, and I feel that a man who has any is in some way dishonest, but I never before saw anything like that person who had come out of the woods to the rescue of my family fortune, and I simply stared at him as he stood with a fluff of seething white wings around his feet and towered against the green gray of an old tree that hung over the side of the road.  He was tall and broad, but lithe and lovely like some kind of a woods thing, and heavy hair of the same brilliant burnished red that I had seen upon the back of a prize Rhode Island Red in the lovely water-color plates in my chicken book,—­which had tempted me to buy “red” until I had read about the triumphs of the Leghorn “whites,”—­waved close to his head, only ruffling just over his ears enough to hide the tips of them.  His eyes were set so far back under their dark, heavy, red eyebrows that they seemed night-blue with their long black fringe of lashes.  His face was square and strong