ard me.

Then slowly, very slowly, I raised my hand, touched her feathers with
the tip of one finger--with two fingers--with my whole hand, while the
loud camera click-clacked, click-clacked hardly four feet away!

It was a thrilling moment. I was not killing anything. I had no
long-range rifle in my hands, coming up against the wind toward an
unsuspecting creature hundreds of yards away. This was no wounded
leopard charging me; no mother-bear defending with her giant might a
captured cub. It was only a mother-bird, the size of a wild duck,
with swift wings at her command, hiding under those wings her own and
another's young, and her own boundless fear!

For the second time in my life I had taken captive with my bare hands a
free wild bird. No, I had not taken her captive. She had made herself a
captive; she had taken herself in the strong net of her mother-love.

And now her terror seemed quite gone. At the first touch of my hand I
think she felt the love restraining it, and without fear or fret she let
me reach under her and pull out the babies. But she reached after them
with her bill to tuck them back out of sight, and when I did not let
them go, she sidled toward me, quacking softly, a language that I
perfectly understood, and was quick to respond to. I gave them back,
fuzzy and black and white. She got them under her, stood up over them,
pushed her wings down hard around them, her stout tail down hard behind
them, and together with them pushed in an abandoned egg that was
close at hand. Her own baby, some one else's baby, and some one else's
forsaken egg! She could cover no more; she had not feathers enough. But
she had heart enough; and into her mother's heart she had already tucked
every motherless egg and nestling of the thousands of frightened birds,
screaming and wheeling in the air high over her head.

THE END

REFERENCE LISTS FOR STORY-TELLING AND COLLATERAL READING

REFERENCE LISTS FOR STORY-TELLING AND COLLATERAL READING

(The grades assigned are merely suggestive, as some of the stories may
be used in higher or lower grades than here indicated.)

NEW YEAR'S DAY

For grades 1-4.

An All-the-Year-Round Story, in Poulsson, In the Child's World; Peter
the Stone-Cutter, in Macdonell, Italian Fairy Book; The Forest Full of
Friends, in Alden, Why the Chimes Rang.

For grades 5-8.

A Chinese New Year's in California, in Our Holidays Retold from St.
Nicholas; A New Ye