to catch him, but it takes a very quick and a
very small pair of wings to follow Chickadee. Once I was watching him
hanging head down from an oak twig to which the dead leaves were
clinging; for it was winter. Suddenly there was a rush of air, a flash
of mottled wings and fierce yellow eyes and cruel claws. Chickadee
whisked out of sight under a leaf. The hawk passed on, brushing his
pinions. A brown feather floated down among the oak leaves. Then
Chickadee was hanging head down, just where he was before. "_Tsic a
dee?_ Didn't I fool him!" he seemed to say. He had just gone round his
twig, and under a leaf, and back again; and the danger was over. When
a hawk misses like that he never strikes again.

Boys generally have a kind of sympathetic liking for Chickadee. They
may be cruel or thoughtless to other birds, but seldom so to him. He
seems somehow like themselves.

Two barefoot boys with bows and arrows were hunting, one September
day, about the half-grown thickets of an old pasture. The older was
teaching the younger how to shoot. A robin, a chipmunk, and two or
three sparrows were already stowed away in their jacket pockets; a
brown rabbit hung from the older boy's shoulder. Suddenly the younger
raised his bow and drew the arrow back to its head. Just in front a
chickadee hung and twittered among the birch twigs. But the older boy
seized his arm.

"Don't shoot--don't shoot him!" he said.

"But why not?"

"'Cause you mustn't--you must never kill a chickadee."

And the younger, influenced more by a certain mysterious shake of the
head than by the words, slacked his bow cheerfully; and with a last
wide-eyed look at the little gray bird that twittered and swung so
fearlessly near them, the two boys went on with their hunting.

No one ever taught the older boy to discriminate between a chickadee
and other birds; no one else ever instructed the younger. Yet somehow
both felt, and still feel after many years, that there is a
difference. It is always so with boys. They are friends of whatever
trusts them and is fearless. Chickadee's own personality, his cheery
ways and trustful nature had taught them, though they knew it not. And
among all the boys of that neighborhood there is still a law, which no
man gave, of which no man knows the origin, a law as unalterable as
that of the Medes and Persians: _Never kill a chickadee_.

If you ask the boy there who tells you the law, "Why not a chickadee
as well as a sparrow?