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The other thing came out of a less personal greed, and was years later: Arthur and I were collecting eggs, and in the loft over one of the out-houses there was a swallow's nest too high up to be reached by any ladder we could get up there. I was intent on getting the _eggs_, and thought of no other thing that might chance: so I spread a soft fall below, and with a long pole I broke the floor of the nest. Then with a sudden stir of horror I saw soft things falling along with the clay, tiny and feathery. Two were killed by the breakage that fell with them, but one was quite alive and unhurt. I gathered up the remnants of the nest and set it with the young one in it by the loft window where the parent-birds might see, making clumsy strivings of pity to quiet my conscience. The parent-birds did see, soon enough: they returned, first up to the rafters, then darting round and round and crying; then to where their little one lay helpless and exposed, hung over it with a nibbling movement of their beaks for a moment, making my miserable heart bound up with hope: then away, away, shrieking into the July sunshine. Once they came back, and shrieked at the horror of it all, and fled away not to return. I remained for hours and did whatever silly pity could dictate: but of course the young one died: and I--_cleared away all remains that nobody might see_! And that I gave up egg-collecting after that was no penance, but choice. Since then the poignancy of my regret when I think of it has never softened. The question which pride of life and love of make-believe till then had not raised in me, "Am I a god to kill and to make alive?" was answered all at once by an emphatic "No," which I never afterward forgot. But the grief remained all the same, that life, to teach me that blunt truth, should have had to make sacrifice in the mote-hung loft of three frail lives on a clay-altar, and bring to nothing but pain and a last miserable dart away into the bright sunshine the spring work of two swift-winged intelligences. Is man, we are told to think, not worth many sparrows? Oh, Beloved, sometimes I doubt it! and would in thought give my life that those swallows in their generations might live again. Beloved, I am letting what I have tried to tell you of my childhood end in a sad way. For it is no use, no use: I have not to-day a glimmer of hope left that your eyes will ever rest on what I have been at such deep trouble to write. If I we
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