Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/772

764 "But surely nobody puts birds in a sack?" cried Janet in a tone of horror.

"Don't they though! What else could you do with them when you catch such a lot? They stuff them in, one after another."

"Oh, Jack!"

"It's a fact. You ask anybody. Why, that's the fun of the thing."

"But they must get suffocated?"

"So they do — some of them. You've got to take your chance of that. There's sure to be more alive than dead. What you do is to catch a bag full of them, and then the man at the shop gives you so much for the lot, and you tumble them all out into a cage."

"Oh, poor little things!"

"Well, I must say it's pretty hard lines for them, but that's their look-out. There's an awful scrimmage sometimes when they get into the cage. You can fancy it — can't you? Just think — two or three score of birds put into a cage not that size. And then, when they get their food! Why, they fight so, and they're jammed so close that sometimes — sometimes after a night of it — there's nine-tenths of them dead. But that's bad management," said Jack, severely. "I say, if it's worth your while to buy birds, it's worth your while to keep them alive."

"But Jack," said Janet, with the saddest face, "I think you're trying to deceive me. Do you really mean that people are so dreadfully cruel to the poor little birds?" "Oh — cruel? — that's all stuff. They can't help it — at least, not most of it. I think, for their own sake," said Jack with an air of wisdom, "that they ought to give them a little more room."

"But it seems so dreadful."

"It ain't a bit more dreadful than other things. It all depends on what you're used to."

"But the birds never can be used to being packed in bags."

"Oh, I ain't thinking of the birds. I mean it don't seem dreadful to the people who do it. It's right enough for them to do it, if it's got to be done," said Jack, with an off-hand philosophy that was, I am afraid, too much for Janet's understanding.

And, in truth, I fear in this new life of hers there were many things too much for Janet's understanding. There was so much that seemed strange to her — so much that jarred with the teaching of her early years. She did not indeed argue about it. She came by degrees to accept it all patiently, as children so often do; but, unconsciously to herself, as she grew used to it, every spark of brightness, every touch of warmth, died out of her little life. She had not much spirit, you see, this poor, little, lonely Janet.

 

 From Chambers' Journal.

, much talked about lately in connection with the doings of a wonderful pedestrian, is the leaf of the Erythroxylon coca, a climbing-plant, seldom attaining six feet in height, bearing small white flowers succeeded by red berries. The leaves, about an inch and a half long, are of a pale bright green and quite smooth, somewhat resembling those of the myrtle. When fit forgathering — an operation performed three or four times a year — they fall off at the slightest touch of the hand; and after being dried in the sun, are collected in baskets large enough to hold half a hundredweight of leaves. The plant is little known in this country.

Although strange to European experience, coca has been in high favour with the Indians of South America for centuries, as an infallible preventive of hunger and weariness. Peter de Cieza tells us the Peruvian Indians of his time, esteeming the coca-tree of far higher account than the best wheat, nourished it carefully in the mountains of the Andes, from Guamanga to the town of La Plata; and when they acquired a new piece of land, at once set about calculating how many baskets of coca it would yield. So great was the demand for it, particularly at the mines of Potosi, and so extensively was it cultivated, that in the years 1548, 1549, 1550, and 1551, the plantations gave an annual return to their proprietors of from forty thousand to eighty thousand "pieces of eight." This is not to be wondered at, considering that the Indians had such hearty faith in the virtues of coca, that, believing the more they ate of it the stronger they became, they were never seen without some leaves in their mouths, from the time they rose in the morning till the time they turned in for the night; while before setting out on a journey they took especial care to fill their leathern pouches with coca-leaves, and their calabashes with "a whitish sort of earth" to be eaten with them. The simple leaf sufficed their necessities at home, unless bent upon a little extra exhilaration, in which case they took tobacco-leaves and coca-leaves in combination.