was a splendid
creature, with a brilliant orange throat darkly spotted. He flew from
tree to tree, chattering gayly, and had a really pretty song. Evidently
he was in the best of spirits, notwithstanding the rather obtrusive
attentions of a crowd of house sparrows, who appeared to look upon such
a wearer of the green as badly out of place in this new England of
theirs. But for all his vivacity, I feared he would not be long in
coming to grief. If he escaped other perils, the cold weather must soon
overtake him, for it was now the middle of September, and his last state
would be worse than his first. He had better have kept his cage; unless,
indeed, he was one of the nobler spirits that prefer death to slavery.

Of all the birds thus far named, very few seemed to attract the
attention of anybody except myself. But there remains one other, whom I
have reserved for the last, not because he was in himself the noblest or
the most interesting (though he was perhaps the biggest), but because,
unlike the rest, he did succeed in winning the notice of the multitude.
In fact, my one owl, to speak theatrically, made a decided hit; for a
single afternoon he may be said to have been famous,--or at all events
notorious, if any old-fashioned reader be disposed to insist upon this
all but obsolete distinction. His triumph, such as it was, had already
begun when I first discovered him, for he was then perched well up in an
elm, while a mob of perhaps forty men and boys were pelting him with
sticks and stones. Even in the dim light of a cloudy November afternoon
he seemed quite bewildered and helpless, making no attempt to escape,
although the missiles were flying past him on all sides. The most he did
was to shift his perch when he was hit, which, to be sure, happened
pretty often. Once he was struck so hard that he came tumbling toward
the ground, and I began to think it was all over with him; but when
about half-way down he recovered himself, and by dint of painful
flappings succeeded in alighting just out of the reach of the crowd. At
once there were loud cries: "Don't kill him! Don't kill him!" and while
the scamps were debating what to do next, he regained his breath, and
flew up into the tree again, as high as before. Then the stoning began
anew. For my part I pitied the fellow sincerely, and wished him well out
of the hands of his tormentors; but I found myself laughing with the
rest to see him turn his head and stare, with his bi