Page:Under the Sun.djvu/367

Rh the first. On the contrary, I like birds, — little ones. But my wife has, all through, insisted on it that I do not love “God’s creatures,” as she calls them, and took from the first a certain complacent pride in having made me more Christian-like in this matter. “You won’t hurt it, will you, John?” she pleaded, pathetically, when she hung up a linnet.

“Hurt it!” I said, in astonishment, for I am a very Buddhist in my tenderness to animals. “ On the contrary — ”

“Yes, dear, I know how you hate them; and you are a sweet, good old darling to say you love them, just to please me.”

“You are quite mistaken,” I began, “in supposing — ”

“No, I am not, you good old duck, for you always pretended just in the same way that you liked Lucy (my wife’s cousin), though I know you don’t, for soon after we were married, I remember you called her a gadabout and a gossip.”

And the end of it was that I was mean enough to accept the virtues of self-denial and consideration thus thrust upon me. Consequently, I have had ever since to affect a condescension whenever I take notice of the birds, although when my wife is not there I waste a good deal of time over the pretty things.

But “God’s creatures,” after all, is a term that you can lump most things under. And if my wife had drawn a distinction between the linnet and her great parrot, more like a vulture than a cage-bird, I would have candidly confessed to a difference in my regard for the two fowls. Linnets are very harmless, I fancy. At any rate, ours never does anything more outrageous than