, and more, his father's pride, and more. The child is
not meant to die, but to be forever fresh born.

Curdie had made himself a bow and some arrows, and was teaching himself
to shoot with them. One evening in the early summer, as he was walking
home from the mine with them in his hand, a light flashed across his
eyes. He looked, and there was a snow-white pigeon settling on a rock
in front of him, in the red light of the level sun. There it fell at
once to work with one of its wings, in which a feather or two had got
some sprays twisted, causing a certain roughness unpleasant to the
fastidious creature of the air.

It was indeed a lovely being, and Curdie thought how happy it must be
flitting through the air with a flash--a live bolt of light. For a
moment he became so one with the bird that he seemed to feel both its
bill and its feathers, as the one adjusted the other to fly again, and
his heart swelled with the pleasure of its involuntary sympathy.
Another moment and it would have been aloft in the waves of rosy
light--it was just bending its little legs to spring: that moment it
fell on the path broken-winged and bleeding from Curdie's cruel arrow.

With a gush of pride at his skill, and pleasure at his success, he ran
to pick up his prey. I must say for him he picked it up
gently--perhaps it was the beginning of his repentance. But when he
had the white thing in his hands its whiteness stained with another red
than that of the sunset flood in which it had been revelling--ah God!
who knows the joy of a bird, the ecstasy of a creature that has neither
storehouse nor barn!--when he held it, I say, in his victorious hands,
the winged thing looked up in his face--and with such eyes!--asking
what was the matter, and where the red sun had gone, and the clouds,
and the wind of its flight. Then they closed, but to open again
presently, with the same questions in them.

And as they closed and opened, their look was fixed on his. It did not
once flutter or try to get away; it only throbbed and bled and looked
at him. Curdie's heart began to grow very large in his bosom. What
could it mean? It was nothing but a pigeon, and why should he not kill
a pigeon? But the fact was that not till this very moment had he ever
known what a pigeon was. A good many discoveries of a similar kind
have to be made by most of us. Once more it opened its eyes--then
closed them again, and its throbbing ceased. Curdie gave a sob: