ce, proved a dubious blessing. He was in angry temper from
the first, and a brilliant new cage, fitted up with all the modern
conveniences and latest luxuries, failed to appease him in the least.
He would thrust his head between the gilded bars so violently that he
could not draw it back, and while we were doing our clumsy best to
extricate him he would peck our fingers with furious ingratitude. He
upset his porcelain dishes, declined to use his swing and, as a rule,
rejected all the attractions of his criss-cross perches, fluttering
back and forth and madly beating against the bars or huddling in an
unhappy little bundle on the floor. It was a matter of weeks before we
could coax him into conversation, and then his abrupt, metallic chirps
were so sharp that Mary, who scorned and disliked him as a foreigner,
was scandalized.

"Don't ye talk with him. It's all sauce that Jap is giving yez."

Even Robin Hood, social little fellow that he was, tried in vain, later
on, to make friends with this ungracious stranger. The East and the
West could not meet. In response to Robin's cheery chatter, Taka would
bristle, turn away and maintain a stubborn silence.

I used to carry his cage out of doors with me and set it up on the
bank, where crocuses followed snowdrops, and tulips followed crocuses,
beside the steamer-chair, hoping that he would feel more at home amid
the blossoms and bird music of the spring. But there little Lord Sulks
would sit, bunched into a corner of his palace, deigning no response
whatever to the soft greetings of the bluebirds, those "violets of
song," nor to the ecstatic trills of the fox sparrows, nor even to the
ringing challenge of Lieutenant Redwing, as he flashed by overhead on
his way to Tupelo swamp.

A calling ornithologist examined Taka carefully and concluded that he
was an old bird, although the dealer had glibly represented him as
being in the very pink of youth. So our poor prisoner was perhaps not
born in captivity and may have had more than ancestral memories of
spreading rice fields, tea plantations and holy bamboo groves. Our
brave blue squills, our sunny forsythias, our coral-tinted laurels
could not break his dream of flushing lotus and flaming azalea. What
was our far-off glimpse of silvery Wachusett to the radiant glories of
sea-girt Fujiyama? I hinted that a pet monkey might solace his
nostalgia, but to such suggestion Joy-of-Life remained persistently
deaf.

The children of the n