and, before we could stop him, he was in.  The hole was too small to admit a hand, though not a rat or a snake, so the prospect was gloomy.  Suddenly a happy inspiration came to me.  That sad, husky cry with which he expressed his need of a mother was not difficult to mimic, and he might be cheated into thinking that a lost brother or sister was looking for him.  I retired and made the attempt, and, hark! a faint echo came from the wall.  At each repetition it became clearer, until the round face and great eyes appeared at the mouth of the hole.  Then the round body tumbled out, and little Tommy was hobbling about, looking, with pathetic eagerness, for “the old familiar faces.”  When he discovered how he had been betrayed, his face went down and he suffered himself to be carried quietly to the canary’s cage in which he was kept.

It seemed to be time now to begin Tommy’s education, for I judged that, if he had been at home, he would ere then have been getting nightly lessons in the poacher’s art.  So I procured a small gecko, one of those grey house lizards, with pellets at the ends of their toes, which come down from the roof after the lamps are lit and gorge themselves on the foolish moths and plant bugs that come to the light.  Securing it with a thin cord tied round its waist, I introduced it into Tommy’s cage.  He looked surprised, very much surprised.  He raised himself to his full height.  He gazed at it.  He curtseyed.  He gave a little jump and was standing with both feet on the lizard.  A moment more and the lizard was gliding down his throat with my thin cord after it.  Mr. Seton Thompson would have us believe that all young things are laboriously trained by their parents, just like human children, and if he was an eye-witness of all the scenes that he describes so vividly, it must be so with other young things.  But he did not know Tommy, who is the bird of Minerva and evidently sprang into being, like his patron goddess, with all his armour on.

After a time, when he had exchanged his infant down for a suit of feathers, he was promoted to a large cage out in the garden, and his regular diet was a little raw meat or a mutton bone tied to one of his perches, but, by way of a treat, I would offer him, whenever I could get it, a locust, or large grasshopper.  His way of accepting this was unique and pretty.  He would look surprised, stare, curtsey once or twice, stare again and then, suddenly, noiselessly and as lightly as a fairy, flit across the cage and, without alighting, pluck the insect from my fingers with both his feet and return to his perch.