Page:Under the Sun.djvu/366

342 so, whenever I refuse to buy any now, he thinks I am too mean to give my birds a pennyworth of groundsel now and then. It is very cruel to birds to keep them without any green food at all.”

I felt at the time that there was something wrong about this line of argument, but could not quite see where to fix the error without going very far back to the beginning (though women, it seems to me, always do this), so I let it pass, not thinking it worth while to point out again that, as she had no bird, the grounselgroundsel [sic] seller’s animadversions and suspicions were without foundation, and therefore absurd.

And then my wife went on to give other reasons for wanting to have a bird; but the only one I can remember just now was to the effect that the bird would not give any trouble to anybody but herself, and that it could not possibly matter to me whether she had a bird or not. I am not quite sure that I have given that reason right, but it is about as near as I generally get to some of my wife’s reasons for things.

“It will, you see,” she repeated, as she cracked an egg, “be no trouble to anybody but myself. I will look after it myself and — ”

“The Lord in His pitiful mercy keep an eye upon that bird!” I piously ejaculated.

“Oh, John! — and of course I will feed it and wash it — its cage, I mean; not feed the cage, you know, but wash it: and when I go out to do the housekeeping for ourselves,” — which, by the way, always seems to me to consist in meeting friends at the gate and then going off with them to look at new music, — “I will do the bird’s housekeeping, too.”

Now, I really never had any objection to a bird from