It was a thrilling moment. I was not killing anything. I had no high-powered rifle in my hands, coming up against the wind toward an unsuspecting creature hundreds of yards away. This was no wounded leopard charging me; no mother bear defending with her giant might a captured cub. It was only a mother bird, the size of a wild duck, with swift wings at her command, hiding under those wings her own and another's young, and her own boundless fear!

For the second time in my life I had taken captive with my bare hands a free wild bird. No, I had not taken her captive. She had made herself a captive; she had taken herself in the strong net of her mother-love.

And now her terror seemed quite gone. At the first touch of my hand she felt, I think, the love restraining it, and without fear or fret allowed me to push my hand under her and pull out the two downy babies. But she reached after them with her bill to tuck them back out of sight, and when I did not let them go, she sidled toward me, quacking softly a language that I perfectly understood, and was quick to answer.

I gave them back, fuzzy, and black and white. She got them under her, stood up over them, pushed her wings down hard around them, her stout tail down hard behind them, and together with them pushed in an abandoned egg which was close at hand. Her own baby, someone else's baby, and someone else's forsaken egg! She could cover no more; she had not feathers enough. But she had heart enough; and into her mother's heart she had already tucked every motherless egg and nestling of the thousands of frightened birds that were screaming and wheeling in the air high over her head.

AN ORDER FOR A PICTURE

BY ALICE CARY

O GOOD painter, tell me true,

Has your hand the cunning to draw Shapes of things that you never saw? Ay? Well, here is an order for you.

Woods and cornfields, a little brown,-
The picture must not be over-bright, -
Yet all in the golden and gracious light
Of a cloud, when the summer sun is down.

Alway and alway, night and morn,
Woods upon woods, with fields of corn
Lying between them, not quite sere,
And not in the full, thick, leafy bloom,
When the wind can hardly find breathing-room
Under their tassels; cattle near,

Biting shorter the short green grass,

And a hedge of sumach and sassafras,
With bluebirds twittering all around,—
(Ah, good painter, you can't paint sound!) -
These, and the house where I was born,

Low and little, and black and old,
With children, many as it can hold,
All at the windows, open wide,
Heads and shoulders clear outside,
And fair young faces all ablush.

Perhaps you may have seen, some day,
Roses crowding the self-same way,

Out of a wilding, way-side bush.

Listen closer. When you have done

With woods and cornfields and grazing herds, A lady, the loveliest ever the sun

Looked down upon, you must paint for me.
Oh, if I only could make you see

The clear blue eyes, the tender smile,
The sovereign sweetness, the gentle grace,
The woman's soul, and the angel's face
That are beaming on me all the while!
I need not speak these foolish words:
Yet one word tells all I would say -
She is my mother: you will agree

you

That all the rest may be thrown away.

Two little urchins at her knee
You must paint, sir one like me,
The other with a clearer brow,
And the light of his adventurous eyes
Flashing with boldest enterprise:
At ten years old he went to sea,

God knoweth if he be living now,
He sailed in the good ship Commodore
Nobody ever crossed her track

To bring us news, and she never came back. Ah, 't is twenty long years and more

Since that old ship went out of the bay With my great-hearted brother on her deck; I watched him till he shrank to a speck, And his face was toward me all the way. Bright his hair was, a golden brown,

The time we stood at our mother's knee; That beauteous head, if it did go down, Carried sunshine into the sea!

Out in the fields one summer night,

We were together, half afraid

Of the corn-leaves' rustling, and of the shade Of the high hills, stretching so still and far, — Loitering till after the low little light

Of the candle shone through the open door,
And over the hay-stack's pointed top,
All of a tremble, and ready to drop,

The first half-hour, the great yellow star,
That we, with staring, ignorant eyes,
Had often and often watched to see

Propped and held in its place in the skies By the fork of a tall red mulberry-tree,

Which close in the edge of our flax-field grew, -
Dead at the top, just one branch full
Of leaves, notched round, and lined with wool,
From which it tenderly shook the dew
Over our heads, when we came to play
In its hand-breadth of shadow, day after day.
Afraid to go home, sir; for one of us bore
A nest full of speckled and thin-shelled eggs;
The other, a bird, held fast by the legs,
Not so big as a straw of wheat;

The berries we gave her she would n't eat,
But cried and cried, till we held her bill,
So slim and shining, to keep her still.

At last we stood at our mother's knee.
Do you think, Sir, if you try,
You can paint the look of a lie?
If you can, pray have the grace
To put it solely in the face

Of the urchin that is likest me:

I think 't was solely mine, indeed:

But that's no matter paint it so;

The eyes of our mother (take good heed),
Looking not on the nest-full of eggs,

Nor the fluttering bird, held so fast by the legs,
But straight through our faces down to our lies,
And, oh, with such injured, reproachful surprise!
I felt my heart bleed where that glance went, as
though

A sharp blade struck through it.

That you on the canvas are to repeat

You, sir, know,

Things that are fairest, things most sweet,

Woods and cornfields and mulberry-tree,

The mother, the lads, with their bird, at her knee.

But, oh, that look of reproachful woe!

High as the heavens your name I'll shout,

If you paint me the picture, and leave that out.