er, and then,
with his beak full of the delicious compound, would call and chirp
unceasingly until I came near and "made believe" to taste it, and not
till then would he be content to enjoy it himself.

During an absence from home, Birdie once escaped out of doors, and was
seen on the roof of the house singing in high glee; the servants called
him, the cage was put out, but all to no purpose, he evidently meant to
have "a real good time," and kept flying from one tree to another until
he was a quarter of a mile from home. A faithful servant kept him in
sight for three hours, by which time hunger made him return to our
garden, where he feasted on some raspberries, took a leisurely bath in a
tub of water, and at length flew in at a bedroom window, where he was
safely caged. I never knew a bird with so much intelligence, one might
almost say reasoning power. He was once very thirsty after being out of
his cage for many hours, and at luncheon he went to an empty silver
spoon and time after time pretended to drink, looking fixedly at me as
if he felt sure I should know what he meant, and waited quietly until I
put water into the spoon. Another curious trait was his sense of humour.
Whilst I was writing one day he went up to a rose, which was at the far
end of the table, and began pecking at the leaves. I told him not to do
it, when, to my surprise, he immediately ran the whole length of the
table and made a scolding noise up in my face, and then, just like a
naughty child, went back and did it again. He would sometimes try to
tease me away from my writing by taking hold of my pen and tugging at a
corner of the paper, and whenever the terrible operation of cutting his
claws had to be gone through, he quietly curled up his toes and held the
scissors with his beak, so that it needed two people to circumvent his
clever resistance. He had wonderfully acute vision, and would let me
know directly a hawk was in sight, though it might be but the merest
speck in the sky. He once had a narrow escape, for a sparrow-hawk made a
swoop at him in his cage just outside the drawing-room window, and had
no one been at hand would probably have dragged him through the bars.
Whenever he saw a jay or magpie, a jackdaw or cat, his clicking note
always told me of some enemy in sight. For many years Birdie was my
cherished pet, never was there a closer friendship. As I passed his cage
each night I put my hand in to stroke his feathers, and was always