enough
poking pap with a stick down the outstretched throats of gaping young
blackbirds and thrushes as soon as they had sufficiently developed beaks
to open, and coddling up shivering little canaries and larklets in
flannel before the fire when their proper parents would not attend to
their infantile needs--mother tenderly feeding them with the point of a
camel's-hair brush dipped in egg paste and weak wine and water before
they were old enough even to `peep' or flutter their nascent little
wings.

Bye-and-bye, when my sister got big enough, she took charge of all this
part of the business, and saved mother a world of trouble, as she
thankfully acknowledged, without being a bit jealous of her greater
success with the fledgelings; for Jenny handled the little things as
tenderly as if she were a canary herself, and was so fortunate in her
treatment of them, medical and otherwise, that she never lost even the
most delicate of her bird baby patients, nursing them through their
various ailments, and rearing them triumphantly up to the full
perfection of their plumage and song.

You should only have seen her amongst them of a morning when I had the
job of cleaning out their cages, while Jenny gave them all fresh food
and water!

They did not pay much attention to me, save to flutter a bit as I moved
them about, and especially when I put my hand between the bars of their
little wooden prisons; but with Jenny the case was very different.

"Bless you!" as father would say, every one of them knew her and
recognised her as a friend and fellow-comrade, for she would sing to
them sometimes like a lark, which always set them all on the twitter;
goldfinches, linnets, and bullfinches, of which mother kept a large
stock, hopping about their cages trying by every means in their power to
attract her notice on her entering the shop and coming near them; while
the lemon-crested cockatoo, who was christened `Ally Sloper,' on account
of his fine flow of language, and a habit he had of ruffling up the
feathers round his neck when spoken to, making him look as if he had a
particularly high and stiff collar on, would shriek out `Say-rah!' which
was mother's name, just as if father were shouting for her to come
downstairs in a sort of `reef topsails' on a stormy night sort of voice.

Our pet thrush `Jack' also liked her better than any of us, though he
was tame enough to eat out of my hand, giving me a friendly nip with his
sharp beak occa