Softly as a burglar goes, he clambered out upon the sill, lowered himself until he hung by his hands alone, and then dropped safely.  No one seemed to be about upon this side of the house.  He dodged low, and skimmed swiftly across the yard to the low fence.  It was an easy matter to vault this, for a terror urged him such as lifts the gazelle over the thorn bush when the lion pursues.  A crash through the dew-drenched weeds on the roadside, a clutching, slippery rush up the grassy side of the levee to the footpath at the summit, and—­he was free!

The east was blushing and brightening.  The wind, himself a vagrant rover, saluted his brother upon the cheek.  Some wild geese, high above, gave cry.  A rabbit skipped along the path before him, free to turn to the right or to the left as his mood should send him.  The river slid past, and certainly no one could tell the ultimate abiding place of its waters.

A small, ruffled, brown-breasted bird, sitting upon a dog-wood sapling, began a soft, throaty, tender little piping in praise of the dew which entices foolish worms from their holes; but suddenly he stopped, and sat with his head turned sidewise, listening.

From the path along the levee there burst forth a jubilant, stirring, buoyant, thrilling whistle, loud and keen and clear as the cleanest notes of the piccolo.  The soaring sound rippled and trilled and arpeggioed as the songs of wild birds do not; but it had a wild free grace that, in a way, reminded the small, brown bird of something familiar, but exactly what he could not tell.  There was in it the bird call, or reveille, that all birds know; but a great waste of lavish, unmeaning things that art had added and arranged, besides, and that were quite puzzling and strange; and the little brown bird sat with his head on one side until the sound died away in the distance.

The little bird did not know that the part of that strange warbling that he understood was just what kept the warbler without his breakfast; but he knew very well that the part he did not understand did not concern him, so he gave a little flutter of his wings and swooped down like a brown bullet upon a big fat worm that was wriggling along the levee path.

XX

THE HALBERDIER OF THE LITTLE RHEINSCHLOSS

I go sometimes into the Bierhalle and restaurant called Old Munich.  Not long ago it was a resort of interesting Bohemians, but now only artists and musicians and literary folk frequent it.  But the Pilsner is yet good, and I take some diversion from the conversation of Waiter No. 18.

For many years the customers of Old Munich have accepted the place as a faithful copy from the ancient German town.  The big hall with its smoky rafters, rows of imported steins, portrait of Goethe, and verses painted on the walls—­translated into German from the original of the Cincinnati poets—­seems atmospherically correct when viewed through the bottom of a glass.