sed him. As he trilled forth his tender
caressing strain, the heart of the listening woman translated as did
that of the brooding bird.

With shining eyes and flushed cheeks, she sped down the fence. Panting
and palpitating with excitement, she met Abram half-way on his return
trip. Forgetful of her habitual reserve, she threw her arms around his
neck, and drawing his face to hers, she cried: "Oh, Abram! I got it!
I got it! I know what he's saying! Oh, Abram, my love! My own! To me
so dear! So dear!"

"So dear! So dear!" echoed the Cardinal.

The bewilderment in Abram's face melted into comprehension. He swept
Maria from her feet as he lifted his head.

"On my soul! You have got it, honey! That's what he's saying, plain
as gospel! I can tell it plainer'n anything he's sung yet, now I sense
it."

He gathered Maria in his arms, pressed her head against his breast with
a trembling old hand, while the face he turned to the morning was
beautiful.

"I wish to God," he said quaveringly, "'at every creature on earth was
as well fixed as me an' the redbird!" Clasping each other, they
listened with rapt faces, as, mellowing across the corn field, came the
notes of the Cardinal: "So dear! So dear!"

After that Abram's devotion to his bird family became a mild mania. He
carried food to the top rail of the line fence every day, rain or
shine, with the same regularity that he curried and fed Nancy in the
barn. From caring for and so loving the Cardinal, there grew in his
tender old heart a welling flood of sympathy for every bird that homed
on his farm.

He drove a stake to mark the spot where the killdeer hen brooded in the
corn field, so that he would not drive Nancy over the nest. When he
closed the bars at the end of the lane, he always was careful to leave
the third one down, for there was a chippy brooding in the opening
where it fitted when closed. Alders and sweetbriers grew in his fence
corners undisturbed that spring if he discovered that they sheltered an
anxious-eyed little mother. He left a square yard of clover unmowed,
because it seemed to him that the lark, singing nearer the Throne than
any other bird, was picking up stray notes dropped by the Invisible
Choir, and with unequalled purity and tenderness, sending them ringing
down to his brooding mate, whose home and happiness would be despoiled
by the reaping of that spot of green. He delayed burning the
brush-heap from the spring pruning,