nse to her calls
the moment she found herself on a tree, really out in the world. A
little coaxing, a few tender words, and she flew away with him, and we
saw her no more.

FRIENDSHIP IN FEATHERS.

Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not
capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide
and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the
reflecting planet. EMERSON.

XIII.

FRIENDSHIP IN FEATHERS.

Emerson somewhere speaks of a friendship "on one side, without due
correspondence on the other," and I often thought of it while watching
the curious relation between two birds in my house last winter; for the
more one studies our feathered neighbors, the better he comes to realize
that the difference between their intelligence and that of man himself
is "only of less and more."

This friendship, then, was all on one side. It was not a case of "love
at sight"; on the contrary, it was first war, and the birds had been
room-mates for months before any unusual interest was shown; neither was
it simple admiration of beauty, for the recipient of the tenderness was
at his worst at the moment; nor, again, could it be the necessity of
loving somebody, for the devotee had lived in the house ten years, and
had seen forty birds of almost as many kinds come and go, without
exhibiting any partiality. The parties to this curious affair were,
first, the beloved, a male scarlet tanager, whose summer coat was
disfigured with patches of the winter dress he was trying to put on; and
secondly, the lover, a male English goldfinch, scarcely half his size.

The tanager, as perhaps every one knows, is one of our most brilliant
birds, bright scarlet with black wings and tail. He is as shy as he is
gay, living usually in the woods, and not taking at all kindly to the
enforced companionship of mankind. I had long been anxious to make the
acquaintance of this retiring bird, partly because I desire to know
personally all American birds, and partly because I wanted to watch his
change of plumage; for the scarlet uniform is only the marriage dress,
and put off at the end of the season. Hence whenever I saw a tanager in
a New York bird store I brought it home, though dealers always warned me
that it would not live in confinement. My first attempts were
disastrous, certainly. The birds refused to become reconciled, even with
all the privileges I gave them, and one after