“Put him in a cage,” said Mr. Scherman, with equal gravity.

“Yes, of course.  That’s where little house-birds belong.  Duke, see here!  Little birds that live in houses never fly.  And they never pick up crumbs, either, except what are put for them into their own little dishes.  They live in tiny wire rooms, fixed so that they can’t fly out.  Like your nursery, with the bars across the windows, and the gate at the door.  You and Sinsie are two little birds; mamma’s sparrows.  And you mustn’t try to get out of your cage unless she takes you.”

“Then you’re the great sparrow,” put in Sinsie, coming up beside her, laughing.  “Whose sparrow are you?”

Asenath looked up at her husband.

“Yes; it’s a true story, after all.  You can’t make up anything.  It has been all told before.  We’re all sparrows, Sinsie,—­God’s sparrows.”

“In cages?”

“Yes.  Only we can’t always see the wires.  They are very fine.  There!  That’s as far as you or I can understand.  Now be good little birdies, and hop round here together till mamma comes back.”

She went into her own room, to the tiniest little birdie of all, that was just waking.

Sinsie and Marmaduke had got a new play, now.  They were quite contented to be sparrows, and chirp at each other, springing and lighting about, from one green spot to another in the pattern of the nursery carpet.

“I’ll tell you what,” said Sinsie, confidentially; “sparrows don’t have girls to interfere, do they?  They live in the cages and help themselves.  I like it.  I’m glad Agnes is gone.”

Sinsie was four and a half; she had “talked plain” ever since she was one; and the nonsense that her mother had talked to her being always bright nonsense, such as she would talk to anybody on the same subject, there was something quaint in the child’s fashion of speech and her unexpected use of words.  Asenath Scherman did not keep two dictionaries, nor pare off an idea, as she would a bit of apple before she gave it to a child.  It was noticeable how she sharpened their little wits continually against her own without straining them.

And there was a reflex action to this sharpening.  She was fuller of graceful little whims, of quick and keen illustrations, than ever.  Her friends who were admitted to nursery intimacies and nursery talk, said it was ever so much better than any grown-up dinner-tables and drawing-rooms.

“Well,” she would answer, “I’m not much in the way of dinner-tables and drawing-rooms.  I just have to live right along, and what there is of me comes out here.  I rather think we’ll save time and comfort by it in the end,—­Sinsie and I. She won’t want so much special taking into society by and by, before she can learn to tell one thing from another.  Frank and I, with such friends as come here in our own fashion, will make a society for her from the beginning, as well as we can.  She will get more from us in twenty years than she would from ‘society’ in two.  And if I ‘kept up’ outside, now, for the sake of her future, that would be the alternative?  I believe more in growing up than in coming out.”