."

Eliza bit her lip to keep back a smile. A boy in knee pants
transacting business like a grown man, appeared quite amusing to her.

"Oh, I see," she said. "You take orders for your goods. You don't
sell from door to door."

"No, indeed!" answered John Charles with a lofty air. "That's too much
like peddling. I won't peddle. I prefer to get regular customers and
take orders and fill them."

While he had been talking he had been glancing toward me where I hung
in the window, and he now politely asked if he might come to look at
me. Eliza gave a surprised consent, but watched the boy closely as he
stood near and chirped to me calling me, "Po-o-o-r Dickey Downy," as
soon as he found out my name. I saw from the way Eliza kept her eyes
on his movements that she was expecting he would do something to hurt
me, but in this she was pleasantly disappointed, for he never once
touched my cage and cooed as softly when he spoke to me as Polly
herself might have done.

I was quite afraid of him at first, for ever since my experience with
the wicked schoolboys who clubbed us in the linden trees, and my later
experience with Joe, I disliked boys very much.

[Illustration: The Bobolink.]

When John Charles had bidden Eliza "good-morning" and tipped his hat
again and the door closed after him, she said to me: "Why, Dickey, that
was a new kind of a boy! He never once tried to hurt you or to scare
you. It shows that all boys are not rough, and I shall always like
John Charles, for he is a little gentleman."

To this sentiment I fully agreed, and I thought, "Alas! why are not all
boys as gentle as John Charles?"

In a few hours I felt as much at home with Eliza as if I had always
lived there, and I was much pleased when I heard her tell Katharine at
the supper table the next evening how much she had enjoyed having me
with her.

"A bird is ever so much better company than a clock," she said; "though
when I'm here by myself I always like to hear the clock tick. It seems
as if I were not so entirely alone. But a bird is better. I talked to
Dickey to-day and he twittered back. He has such a cute way of perking
his little head to one side just as knowing as you please, and he acts
exactly as if he were considering whether he should answer 'yes' or
no' to what I say, and then it is such fun to watch him smooth down his
feathers. He washes and irons them so nicely and works away as
industriously as if he were afraid he