ey took him to Sunday School, muffling him in a
spick-and-span small handkerchief when his cries became too shrill and,
after this vain attempt at spiritual comfort, gave him to one of their
mammas, who, for several days, managed to sustain him on experimental
diets. Thursday morning, being about to make her summer exodus, she
cheerfully transferred her fosterling to me. Her farewell attention, a
spoonful of milk poured down his yawning throat, nearly ended his
adventures on the spot. He turned up his eyes, gasped and stiffened,
but with admirable presence of mind she balanced him on his bill, gave
him a dexterous tap in the crop and wiped up the milk from the table,
while Robin, blinking ruefully, resigned himself to a nap in my pocket.
He woke before we reached home, however, and demanded luncheon so
imperiously that I called at the nearest house and begged for bread. At
the drug store I paused again for water and, to make better connection
between this fluid and the depths of that bright orange cavity which
Robin so confidingly opened, I bought a medicine-dropper, but soon
found that a finger-tip would do as well.

Owing to these attentions by the way, Robin Hood was in an agreeable
and sociable frame of mind when he first met his adopted family, yet
all his baby graces gained for him only a mocking reception. He was
such a dumpy, speckle-breasted fluff, with funny folding legs that
could not hold him up on the perch, no tail and an utterly
disproportionate amount of bill, that it was impossible to take him
seriously, but his trustful little heart never once suspected that we
were making fun of him. He cuddled down cosily on an improvised couch
in the corner of a canary cage and devoted himself to a steady
alternation of snoozes and gorges. Everybody laughed at him--the Dryad,
who declared him a little monster of greediness and bad manners; the
chipmunks, who peered curiously into his cage whenever we left it for
sun and air on the piazza; even Joy-of-Life, who promptly sallied out
with a long iron spoon to dig him worms. For Robin Hood would keep on
ringing his dinner-bell, so to speak, even while the moistened bits of
bread were being thrust down his vociferous throat, ceasing from that
hungry clamor only when he was stuffed to the point of suffocation.
Then, with a ridiculous little grunt, he would topple off the
supporting hand back to his trundle-bed and doze like a dormouse only
to awake, in half an hour or so,