ddle, with an immediate publication threatened and the fear before me
of having after all to scamp the essential business of the end. At the
same time, though I love my Davy, I am a little anxious to get on again
on _The Young Chevalier_. I have in nearly all my works been trying one
racket: to get out the facts of life as clean and naked and sharp as I
could manage it. In this other book I want to try and megilp them
together in an atmosphere of sentiment, and I wonder whether twenty-five
years of life spent in trying this one thing will not make it impossible
for me to succeed in the other. However it is the only way to attempt a
love story. You can't tell any of the facts, and the only chance is to
paint an atmosphere.

It is a very warm morning--the parrot is asleep on the door (she heard
her name, and immediately awakened)--and my brains are completely addled
by having come to grief over Davy.

Hurray! a subject discovered! The parrot is a little white cockatoo of
the small variety. It belongs to Belle, whom it guards like a watch dog.
It chanced that when she was sick some months ago I came over and
administered some medicine. Unnecessary to say Belle bleated, whereupon
the parrot bounded upon me and buried his neb in my backside. From that
day on the little wretch attacked me on every possible occasion, usually
from the rear, though she would also follow me along the verandah and as
I went downstairs attack my face. This was far from funny. I am a person
of average courage, but I don't think I was ever more cordially afraid
of anything than of this miserable atomy, and the deuce of it was that I
could not but admire her appalling courage and there was no means of
punishing such a thread-paper creature without destroying it entirely.
Act II. On Graham's arrival I gave him my room and came out to Lloyd's
in the lower floor of Belle's--I beg your pardon--the _parrot's_--house.
The first morning I was to wake Belle early so that breakfast should be
seen to for our guest. It was a mighty pretty dawn, the birds were
singing extraordinary strong, all was peace, and there was the damned
parrot hanging to the knob of Belle's door. Courage, my heart! On I went
and Cockie buried her bill in the joint of my thumb. I believe that Job
would have killed that bird; but I was more happily inspired--I caught
it up and flung it over the verandah as far as I could throw. I must say
it was violently done, and I looked with some anxie