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