lage
of Northbourne. After that, the pupils being pronounced 'finished,'
Jerry Blunt set forth, with his batch of performers, to London, where
he got a fairly good price for his well-trained songsters. His birds
sold off rapidly, each of them going off to be the pride and joy of
some girl or boy's heart with the tuneful old melody--

'O where and O where has my Hieland laddie gane?'

and Jerry returned home with orders for many more bullfinches as he
could procure.

These orders, however, he was doubtful of executing; the finches were
getting too advanced in age to prove docile pupils. Still, Jerry would
do his best, and he set off to trap some young birds that had already
left the parent-nests. The work of training these advanced birds was
quite as difficult. However, Jerry was a persevering individual,
gifted with wondrous patience, an untiring teacher. He succeeded
beyond his hopes, and as time went on was enabled to earn what he
called a 'tidy' sum.

''Tis wonderful strange, Jerry, my son, that ye can train the morsels
o' critters to sing what we may call human tunes! Nobody, of course,
could do it but yer own self, I'm sure,' grudgingly admitted his
mother, when success became sure.

'The idea! That's so like you, mother!' laughed Jerry, as he softly
tickled the head of the bullfinch he had retained as a gift for Miss
Theedory out of the first and best batch. 'You're that conceited, you
think that your own son can do all things better than other folk. But
I could tell you a true story, now, of what others have done.'

And in his own words Jerry related, while his mother knitted in the
firelight, how a great musician had, as a youth, trained a young
bullfinch to pipe 'God save the King.' The musician was much attached
to the bird, and the bird to him. Love begets love, with the animal
creation at least, which is, undoubtedly, the simple secret of the
strange power possessed by some human beings over birds and beasts. If
you desire to be their masters, you must, first of all, love the dumb
creatures. Where love is, all things are possible. Bull-finches, in
particular, have a strongly developed faculty for attaching themselves.
And the simple logic is easy to follow out. In the training already
described, music and pleasure--that is, the food and sunlight, which
constitute Bully's pleasure--are inseparably connected. Hence it
follows soon, that the bird, to show his joy at the sight of his ow