Sigurd Our Golden Collie, and Other Comrades of the Road

For a fortnight longer Robin was our daily joy. It seemed to make us intimates of the woods to hear, as we were walking there, the hail of a familiar voice from overhead and look up to see our own small Speckle peeping down at us from some breezy twig against the blue. For he soon recovered from his penitence and went sailing through the trees on ever longer voyages of discovery, being often out of call for two or three hours at a time. But he was always on the window box, where no other robin ever came, in the early morning from half-past three on to seven, overflowing with conversation and insisting on intelligent replies to his remarks. At intervals throughout the day, too, I would hear a soft thud on the box, followed by a chirp-p-p and the flap-p-p of a very impatient and business-like little wing. On these occasions Robin Hood was quite too much occupied with his greenwood affairs to feed himself, and I must needs drop book or pen and cram refreshment down his importunate yellow gullet till it could hold no more. Then he would hop across to his Japanese water-cup, take a dozen eager dips, wipe his bill first on one side, then the other, on the edge of the box, and then, flapping his wing for good-by, sweep off again. In the middle of every forenoon and, during the hottest weather, of the afternoon as well, he alighted on his cage and called imperiously to Mary to bring him fresh water for his bath. We shut him in during this and during his sun-baths, since he enjoyed these rites so much as to be even more than commonly oblivious of cats.

On the evening of July 24 the mercury "dropped on us," as Mary said, some thirty degrees, and a drenching rain fell all night – a new experience for Robin Hood, who appeared at my window Thursday morning, a draggled little vagabond. Had there been no wise robin at hand to teach him how to take the oil from his back pockets and convert his airy fluff into a tight-fitting waterproof? He was glad to come in out of the wet and spent the forenoon in Mary's kitchen, letting her fondle him as she would, but flying with alarm from the proffered caresses of market-man and grocer-boy. In the course of the next few days, however, he began to protest a little when even his old friends stooped to take him up. He would hop backward, snapping his bill, but he seldom flew and, if the hand did not remain closed upon him, but left him perching free on wrist or finger, he was entirely content.

On August 8 we did our Robin wrong. An expected dinner guest had expressed a desire to see him and, as by this time he was spending his nights, presumably, in a far-off Robin roost, for which he sometimes started early in the afternoon, Mary caught him during the absorbed ecstasy of his sun-bath and shut him into the cage. This was still a favorite resort of his, and he did not object in the slightest until a young robin playmate with whom he was in the habit of flying to the roost whistled for him from a scarlet oak. Then Robin chirped to us to let him out, growing frantic with excitement as we, hitherto so prompt to obey his behests, made no move for his release. He called and called again, beating about the cage and even breaking into a song of wild entreaty. Shame-faced and conscience-stricken, we yet put him off, expecting our guest minute by minute. It was nearly seven when regrets were telephoned, but by that time Robin was in a panic and smote our hearts by the terror with which he fluttered back from us as we bent over the cage.

The instant the lid was raised he whirred up to the scarlet oak, where his faithful chum still waited, but before their belated departure Robin flew down to Dame Gentle's window and told her all about it, and then over to Giant Bluff's piazza, where he rehearsed his grievances again in a scolding chirp never heard from him before.

We closed the house on the fourteenth and went away, unforgiven by Robin Hood, who has never, so far as I know, come to human hand since Mary's clasp betrayed him to captivity. During those six days we caught flying glimpses of our estranged fosterling, easily recognized from a distance by the two white feathers in his tail, and a few times he started, by sheer force of habit, to hop across the road to us from Dame Gentle's, but, half-way over, he would turn sharply about, give an angry little yep, and hop back again.

When we reopened the house in late September, not even Dame Gentle had recent news of Robin Hood, and all the winter long we carried a sorrowful sense of broken friendship. We were anxious about our hand-reared birdling, too, hardly daring to hope that he could survive the perils of migration. What a desperate adventure it seemed!

"Who hath talked to the shy bird-people,And counseled the feathered breastTo follow the sagging rain-windOver the purple crest?"

But on the sixth day of March Robin Hood came home. There had been a baby blizzard the night before and, as we returned from college in the early afternoon, I noticed birdtracks in the light snow that still mantled the piazza rail.

"See those prints, right where Robin Hood used to sit and watch us take our supper!" I exclaimed, a wild hope knocking at my heart, but Joy-of-Life thought it a case of hungry tree sparrows and, with her especial tenderness for the plucky, one-legged fox sparrow that had consorted with them all winter, went in to find them a choice handful of scraps. But when, a few minutes later, I entered my chamber, there outside his accustomed window, on the feeding-box now drifted over with snow, sat a great, plump, glossy redbreast, staring into the room with Robin's own bright eyes and cocking his head to listen to our welcome. He fluttered back to the nearest tree, when we opened the window, indicating that he had learned a thing or two, in the gossip of the long aerial journeys, about the human race, nor did he ever again enter the house nor let us touch him, but he kept close by, for weeks, perching in his old familiar places on roof and rail and window-ledge, hopping in our walks and gamboling in our eyes. Out in the open, he would come within a few inches of us and there take his stand and chirp the confidences that we would have given all our dictionaries to comprehend. He was such a tall, stately robin, with such an imposing air of travel and experience as he stood erect, swelling his bright breast with the effort to relate his Winter's Tale, that Joy-of-Life rechristened him Lord Bobs.

In course of time our gallant fledgling appeared in company with a mate, most disappointing to our romantic anticipation, – a faded crosspatch old enough to be his grandmother, a very shrew who scolded him outrageously whenever she saw him lingering beside us. She told him we were ogres, alligators, everything that was horrible and dangerous, and threatened to peck out his last pin-feather unless he flew away from us at once. A selfish old body she was, too, monopolizing the rock-bath, as if she were taking a cure for rheumatism, whole hours at a time, while Robin Hood, hot and dusty, waited on her pleasure in the drooping branches above. But despite her shrill remonstrances, he would still visit the window box, perching on Downy Woodpecker's marrow-bone for an opera stage and trilling his matins and vespers to our delighted ears. We were as proud of Robin Hood's singing as if we had taught him ourselves. Between his carols our troubadour would take a little refreshment, trying in turn Nuthatch's lump of suet, Bluejay's rinds of cheese, Junco's crumbs and his own mocking-bird food, or quaffing rain water from Chickadee's nutshell cups. He would sometimes hop to the sill and, close against the glass, watch all the doings in that world which lay about him in his infancy. We looked forward to an hour when he might bring his own little speckles to play, as he had loved to play, with the empty nutshells, but Mrs. Robin hustled him off to the woods for the nesting season and we were never able after that first spring to distinguish him with certainty among our robin callers. None the less he had made the summer and all summers happier for us by his gracious though guarded pardon for our unkindness.

"Truth never fails her servant, sir, nor leaves himWith the day's shame upon him,"

and even over wild-bird tradition and matrimonial tyranny the truth of our love for Robin Hood, its single lapse forgiven, had prevailed.

WHY THE SPIRE FELL

Our Emperor built a marble churchSo holy never a bird might perchOn cross or crocket or gilded crown,A fretted minster of far renown,But still the spire came crashing down.They stoned the swallow and limed the lark;A rosy throat was an easy mark;The tiniest wren that built her nestIn Christ's own halo, on Mary's breast,Was scared away like a demon guest.Once, twice, thrice, the glistening spireThat soared from the central tower, higherThan all its clustered pinnacles, fell,And not one of the carven saints could tellThe cause, though the emperor quizzed them well.Down in the cloister all strewn with chipsOf alabaster and ivory tipsOf pastoral staffs and angel wings,In a rainbow ruin of sacred thingsHe held high court in the way of kings.All the while in a royal rageHe pelted with fragments of foliage,Curly acanthus and vineleaf scroll,Finial, dogtooth and aureole,The linnets and finches who came to condole.Crowned with a cobwebby cardinal's hatThat swooped from the vaulted roof like a bat,On a tilted porphyry plinth for a throne,The emperor summoned in thunder toneThe hallowed folk of metal and stone.Martyrs, apostles, one and all,Tiptoed down from the quaking wall;Crusaders, uncrossing their legs of brass,Sprang from their tombs; over crackle of glassBalaam rode on a headless ass.But not one of the sculptured cavalcadeFlocking from choir and creamy façade,Deep-arched portal and pillared aisleHad a word on his lips, though all the whileGentle St. Francis was seen to smile.Whistles, chuckles, warbles triedTo give the answer the saints denied;Gurgles, tinkles, twitters, trills,Carols wild as wayward rillsTroubadouring daffodils.St. Peter, high in his canopied nicheSet with jewels exceeding rich,Was dancing a hornpipe over the clock,But before the gargoyles had time to mockFrom his shoulder crowed St. Peter's cock."Kirikiree! Creative LoveThat folds the emperor folds the dove.No church is finished, though grand it be,That lacks the beauty of charity.Buttress your spire. Kirikiree!"So our Emperor reared the spire anew,Yon shaft of glory that cleaves the blue,Held in its place by the lightest thingsGod ever fashioned, the wee, soft wingsOf the birds that join in our worshipings.

AN EASTER CHICK

"Only, what I feel is, that no charity at all can get rid of a certain natural unkindness which I find in things themselves."

– Pater's Marius the Epicurean.

The grippe had held me a prostrate prisoner for weeks. Books, pencils, people were forbidden. It was a strange but not unhappy Lent to lie helpless day after day, gazing through my blessed square of window into a first snowy, then blowy, often rainy and rarely sunshiny patch of woodland, watching the brown oak leaves whirl in hurricane dances above the pine-tops, and the crows wing their strong flight against the gray of the sky. As a cumberer of the earth, I was meekly grateful for the least attention from this active outdoor world, for the cheery pipings of the chickadees, whose wee black bills pounded the marrow-bone on the window-sill, for the guttural greetings of the white-breasted nuthatches who played the acrobat on the swinging, open-work bag of cracked walnuts outside the pane, even for the jeers of the bluejays who swooped to the sash and dashed off like triumphant Dick Turpins with our bounty of bread and cheese.

So Joy-of-Life, hearing of a Boston confectioner's pious offer to bestow an Easter chicken on every customer who should alleviate the fast by the purchase of two pounds of expensive candies at any time during Holy Week, thought she would add to my feathered acquaintance a more intimate companion. Herself an abominator of sweets, she heroically passed a dollar and a half across the counter and received in exchange, beside two boxes of riotous living, a tiny chick, only a day or so out from egg and incubator.

It was pretty, she said, to see the interest with which the tired shop-girls bent over that fluffy morsel of life, petting it with light touches and soothing words, as it was tucked away, with Indian meal for provender and a wad of cotton-wool for bedding, in a gay pasteboard houselet. The color of this miniature mansion was russet flecked with black. The door was a painted sham, but the red-tiled roof swung open. The window boasted four oblong apertures, and the whole establishment was symmetrically set in a half-inch estate of the reddest pasteboard clay. The girl made the roof secure with a few turns of silver cord and the captive was reduced to thrusting an indignant yellow bill through one after another of his window openings, expostulating with all creation in a series of shrill chirps. As the customer stepped out with her premium in hand, the candy-coveting group of ragamuffins outside the window surged forward in rapture at sight and sound of the chicken, and one particularly grimy urchin reached up both arms toward it with such an imploring gesture that the birdling almost changed ownership then and there. But Joy-of-Life bethought herself in time of the conditions of tenement and alley, not favorable to the development of any sort of biped, and said:

"It is for a sick lady. Don't you want her to have it?"

And the tatterdemalion slowly dropped his wistful hands, sighing dutifully, "Yes, m'm."

The chicken-bearer's dignified progress, "cheep, cheep, cheep," across the Common and Public Gardens and through the Back Bay section, afforded her a new gauge for testing human nature. Colonial Dames who looked an aristocratic rebuke she put lower in the scale of sympathy than the Italian organ-grinder whose black eyes laughed frankly into hers, while the maid who opened a door in Newbury street, where Joy-of-Life had a call to make, fell with her shocked, contemptuous stare quite under passing rank.

It was late in the evening before I heard upon the stairs a welcome tread, mounting to that queer accompaniment of cheep, cheep, cheep, now pitched upon a key, had we but ears to hear, of acute distress. My delight in greeting the chicken was not reciprocated, and no wonder. Our unconscious, ignorant crimes against his frail little being had already begun. Joy-of-Life, ever most tender toward the weak, enjoyed, moreover, the advantage of having been reared upon a farm, where she had often watched the life of coop and poultry-yard, but not even she was wise enough to give that chicken comfort.

She had carefully seen to it, all the journey through, that he had oxygen enough. The March wind blew so harshly that she had wanted to shelter the fairy chalet under her cloak, but had feared that the yellow bill, forever thrusting itself through the small casement, would gasp for air. Air! That is the least of a chicken's wants. With all his baby energy, Microbe, as we promptly christened him, had called for heat, heat, heat, and had not been understood. Those thin pasteboard walls and that shred of cotton-wool had left him practically naked to the blast, and he was chilled – poor innocent – to the bone.

And still, in our big, human obtuseness, we did not comprehend. We brought him meal mixed with cold water – an atrocious diet from which he angrily turned away. All at cross purposes, we flattered him foolishly in our alien tongue, while he remonstrated passionately in his. At last the warmth of the room and very weariness quieted that incorrigible cheep a little, and he was put downstairs out of invalid hearing, with a strip of batting cast, like a snowdrift, over his jaunty dwelling.

The family went snugly to bed, while the furnace fire burned lower and lower and the chill of the small hours stole through the house. A less mettlesome chicken, overwhelmed with the loneliness and cruel cold, would have yielded up its accusing little ghost then and there, but this mite had a marvelous spirit of his own and struggled against fate like a De Wet.

In that heavy hour before the dawn, Joy-of-Life was roused from sleep by such desperate chicken shrieks, "Yep, yep, yep! Help, help, help!" that no doors could shut them out. Shivering in her dressing-gown she went down to our unhappy fosterling, who lay stiff and straight, with head thrust forward and legs stretched back, apparently in articulo mortis. The rigid bit of body was cold to her touch, and the only hopeful sign was that shrill, protesting chirp, into which all remaining vitality seemed to be forced. Holding the downy ball compassionately between her palms, this ineffectual giantess – from Microbe's point of view – reflected on the possibilities of the situation only to be baffled. The kitchen fire was out, the oven had not a hint of warmth in it, there was no hot water for the rubber bag. Besides, the chicken seemed too far gone for restoration, and she guiltily smothered him away under the fold of cotton batting and retreated to her chamber. But Microbe had by no means surrendered his sacred little claims to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The persistent prick of his muffled, frantic cries drove sleep from her pillow. She rose once more and, by inspiration, carried the diminutive mansion down cellar, where she placed it on top of the furnace! Instantly the genial heat reached that exhausted chick, who had battled for it so valiantly and long. The white-barred lids slipped up over the round black eyes – for chickens literally "shut their peepers up" – and he was asleep before his rescuer had turned away.

Joy-of-Life did not believe such a day-old atom of mortality could survive this woeful night. She came to my bedside at the breakfast hour and prepared me solemnly for word of Microbe's premature decease. But little did we know as yet the meaning of that maligned phrase "chicken-hearted." She descended at a funereal pace to the cellar, but with the sound of her swift returning feet I laughed to hear, clearer from stair to stair, an eager, spirited little pipe, "Chip, chip, chip! What's up now? Where are we going on this trip, trip?"

Such a wide-awake, enterprising speck of poultry it was that Joy-of-Life proudly set upon the counterpane! He gave prompt proof of his activity by scrambling madly for my plate, and fluttered down, with yellow winglets spread, exactly in the center of my slice of toast.

"It's spring chicken on toast he's giving yez," cried our delighted Mary, and in honor of that ready display of Irish humor, his name was forthwith abbreviated to Mike.

Then he hopped up into my neck, cuddled down, sang a little, contented song and went off to sleep again, waking to find himself the ruler of the roost.

Word of our mutual devotion went abroad and forthwith the critics began. A high-minded friend sent word that if she heard of my lavishing any more affection on that ridiculous little rooster, she would come and wring his yellow neck, and even the Madre herself, she who had borne with my foibles longest and most indulgently, wrote in a flash of scandalous uncharity that she wished I would rest content with the wild birds that God had made, and not waste attention on an illegitimate, incubator chicken.

But "God be with trewthe qwer he be!" The foolish fact is that, in the restlessness of convalescence, when work and worry, thought and humanity must still be shooed from the threshold, I found hourly mirth and comfort in that dot of sunshine. The phenomenal mists and rains of this first April of the new century caused such a dearth of golden lights in the world that a yellow chicken acquired peculiar values. The furnace-man said he was a Wyandotte and, as a feminine household, we invariably put absolute faith in the word of our furnace-man. I do not know how Wyandottes ought to look, but I know that this was a daffodil-colored mite, with legs and feet more slender than chicken wont, and with a hundred diverting, confiding, tyrannical little ways.

I never ceased marveling at the pluck with which this Lilliputian tackled life in the midst of such Brobdingnagian surroundings. The only time I ever saw him scared was when a guest, so well acquainted with chickens as to venture on personal liberties, flourished her glove over the graveled box that served poor little Mike for his Earthly Paradise.

"Squawk! squawk!" he cried in an agitated pipe I had not heard before, and scrabbled wildly to the shelter of my hand, nestling out of sight under the palm in his favorite fashion.

"Did you hear him call hawk, hawk?" asked my erudite visitor. "We have an old biddy at home who nurses a grudge against me this week because I will not let her set, and the last time I went out into the henyard, if she didn't scream hawk, hawk, just like that, and send the chickens scuttling to cover under the barn! The hateful thing! She knew how insulted I would feel to be taken for a hawk!"

But apart from that trying occasion, Mike was a scrap of valor. No member of the family was tall enough to disconcert him. He pecked whatever he saw, from his own feet to the register, and would pounce like a baby pirate upon objects many times larger than himself, cheeping to the world his tidings of magnificent discovery. I am no pastoral linguist, but I learned the rudiments of chicken language from Mike, who was such a chatterbox that he twittered in his sleep.

Meal-times, which he liked to have occur every hour from dawn to dark, brought out his conversational fluency at its best. We tried many experiments with his diet, in obedience to many counselors. We were told that his Indian meal should be mixed with scalding water, that he was too young for this hearty dish and should be fed with dry oatmeal, that minute crumbs of bread would comfort his crop, that larger bits of bread, kindly masticated in advance, were better, that sour milk was essential, mashed potato indispensable, string beans a plausible substitute for angle-worms, that he must be given a chance to swallow gravel to assist the grinding in his wee gizzard mill, and that his cereals should be discreetly spiced with grubs and lettuce leaves and such spring dainties. Whatever we were told to do, we did. Mike's repasts were thus seasons to him of delicious excitement, and he would tear deliriously from one end of his box to the other, pecking to right and left, exclaiming in high glee, "Tweet, tweet! Something to eat! Bless my pin-feathers! Here's a treat!"

This up-to-date son of an incubator had an obstinate instinct in him which made the tap of my finger on the floor of his box equivalent to the tattoo of a hen's bill beside some scratched-up delicacy, and it was funny to see him rush to the sound, his black eyes shining with joyous expectancy. So queerly did instinct serve him that he would grab the goody as if a brood of famished brothers were on his heels and, spreading his bits of wings, race off with his prize, most indiscreetly shrilling as he went, "Twit, twit, twit! You shan't have a bit," and gobbling it down in a corner with choking precipitation.

One of the "Arrows of the Wise" carries the point, "Be not idle and you shall not be longing," and I had no chance to miss my customary vocations with this importunate cockerel demanding constant society and care.

Hatched to the vain anticipation of brooding wings and crooning cluck and the restless pressure of other downy little bodies all about him, Mike was a lonesome chick and could not bear to have his sorry substitute for a mother-hen out of sight and sound a minute. His box must be within reach of my hand, whither every few minutes he would run for a snuggle and a snooze, turning a disdainful back on the elaborate hot-water-bottle and cotton-batting shelters I had been at such pains to erect. The life in him craved contact with life. If I withdrew my hand, having occasionally other uses for it, or neglected to respond to his casual remarks, my ears would suddenly be assailed by a storm of piteous chirps, the neck would stretch until two round eyes peered anxiously above his castle wall, and then, with clamber and scramble, that indomitable little spirit would achieve the impossible and land a fluttering fluff-ball against my face. When I was well enough to move from room to room Mike would dare the most terrific rumbles from his box to come chasing after, though every threshold was a towering obstacle over which a Labor Union of wings and legs could barely carry him.