get that bird?" she demanded of Mrs. McCutcheon, faintly.

"Oh, that is Mr. Riis's bird," said that lady, sparring for time; "a
friend gave it to him--"

"Where you take him?" Mrs. Ben Wah gasped, her hand pressed against her
feeble old heart.

Her friend saw, and gave right up.

"I am not going to take it anywhere," she said. "I brought it for you.
This is to be its home, and you are to be its mother, grandma, and its
friend. You are to be always together from now on--always, and have a
good time." With that she tore the paper from the cage.

The parrot, after all, made the speech of the occasion. He considered
the garret; the potato-field on the fire-escape, through which the
sunlight came in, making a cheerful streak on the floor; Mrs. Ben Wah
and her turban; and his late carrier: then he climbed upon his stick,
turned a somersault, and said, "Here we are," or words to that effect.
Thereupon he held his head over to be scratched by Mrs. Ben Wah in token
of a compact of friendship then and there made.

Joy, after all, does not kill. Mrs. Ben Wah wept long and silently, big,
happy tears of gratitude. Then she wiped them away, and went about her
household cares as of old. The prescription had worked. The next day the
"notice" vanished from the wall of the room, where there were now two
voices for one.

I came back from Europe to find my old friend with a lighter step and a
lighter heart than in many a day. The parrot had learned to speak
Canadian French to the extent of demanding his crackers and water in the
lingo of the _habitant_. Whether he will yet stretch his linguistic
acquirements to the learning of Iroquois I shall not say. It is at least
possible. The two are inseparable. The last time I went to see them, no
one answered my knock on the door-jamb. I raised the curtain that
serves for a door, and looked in. Mrs. Ben Wah was asleep upon the bed.
Perched upon her shoulder was the parrot, no longer constrained by the
bars of a cage, with his head tucked snugly in her neck, asleep too. So
I left them, and so I like to remember them always, comrades true.

It happened that when I was in Chicago last spring I told their story to
a friend, a woman. "Oh, write it!" she said. "You must!" And when I
asked why, she replied, with feminine logic: "Because it is so
unnecessary. The barrel of flour doesn't stick out all over it."

Now I have done as she bade me. Perhaps she was right. Women know these
things best. L