he
spoke with a singularly sweet accent, and asked her if there was not
something I might bring back to her to make her happy. As I talked on,
a reminiscent smile came into her eyes and lingered there. It was
evidently something that pleased her. By slow degrees we dragged the
bashful confession out of her that there was yet one wish she had in
this life.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, when, as a young woman, she had gone
about peddling beads, she had seen a bird, such a splendid bird, big and
green and beautiful, with a red turban, and that could talk. Talk! As
she recalled the glorious apparition, she became quite her old self
again, and reached for her neglected pipe with trembling hands. If she
could ever see that bird again--but she guessed it was long since gone.
She was a young woman then, and now she was old, so old. She settled
back in her chair, and let the half-lighted pipe go out.

"Poor old soul!" said Mrs. McCutcheon, patting the wrinkled hand in her
lap. Her lips framed the word "parrot" across the room to me, and I
nodded back. When we went out together it was settled between us that
Mrs. Ben Wah was to be doctored according to her own prescription, if it
broke the rules of every school of medicine.

I went straight back to the office and wrote in my newspaper that Mrs.
Ben Wah was sick and needed a parrot, a green one with a red tuft, and
that she must have it right away. I told of her lonely life, and of
how, on a Christmas Eve, years ago, I had first met her at the door of
the Charity Organization Society, laboring up the stairs with a big
bundle done up in blue cheese-cloth, which she left in the office with
the message that it was for those who were poorer than she. They were
opening it when I came in. It contained a lot of little garments of
blanket stuff, as they used to make them for the pappooses among her
people in the far North. It was the very next day that I found her in
her attic, penniless and without even the comfort of her pipe. Like the
widow of old, she had cast her mite into the treasury, even all she had.

All this I told in my paper, and how she whose whole life had been
kindness to others was now in need--in need of a companion to share her
lonely life, of something with a voice, which would not come in and go
away again, and leave her. And I begged that any one who had a green
parrot with a red tuft would send it in at once.

New York is a good town to live in. It has a h