t that a border of flowers grew, and by that token he overhung a
bed of soft earth.

Softly as a burglar goes, he clambered out upon the sill, lowered
himself until he hung by his hands alone, and then dropped safely.
No one seemed to be about upon this side of the house. He dodged
low, and skimmed swiftly across the yard to the low fence. It was an
easy matter to vault this, for a terror urged him such as lifts the
gazelle over the thorn bush when the lion pursues. A crash through
the dew-drenched weeds on the roadside, a clutching, slippery rush
up the grassy side of the levee to the footpath at the summit,
and--he was free!

The east was blushing and brightening. The wind, himself a vagrant
rover, saluted his brother upon the cheek. Some wild geese, high
above, gave cry. A rabbit skipped along the path before him, free
to turn to the right or to the left as his mood should send him.
The river slid past, and certainly no one could tell the ultimate
abiding place of its waters.

A small, ruffled, brown-breasted bird, sitting upon a dog-wood
sapling, began a soft, throaty, tender little piping in praise of
the dew which entices foolish worms from their holes; but suddenly
he stopped, and sat with his head turned sidewise, listening.

From the path along the levee there burst forth a jubilant,
stirring, buoyant, thrilling whistle, loud and keen and clear as the
cleanest notes of the piccolo. The soaring sound rippled and trilled
and arpeggioed as the songs of wild birds do not; but it had a
wild free grace that, in a way, reminded the small, brown bird of
something familiar, but exactly what he could not tell. There was
in it the bird call, or reveille, that all birds know; but a great
waste of lavish, unmeaning things that art had added and arranged,
besides, and that were quite puzzling and strange; and the little
brown bird sat with his head on one side until the sound died away
in the distance.

The little bird did not know that the part of that strange warbling
that he understood was just what kept the warbler without his
breakfast; but he knew very well that the part he did not understand
did not concern him, so he gave a little flutter of his wings and
swooped down like a brown bullet upon a big fat worm that was
wriggling along the levee path.

XX

THE HALBERDIER OF THE LITTLE RHEINSCHLOSS

I go sometimes into the _Bierhalle_ and restaurant called Old
Munich. Not long ago it was a resort of in