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Rh to send up some birds to look at — little ones; moreover, before going out, she told her son that my wife wanted a bird — a little one — so when he went to the cage-maker’s he mentioned the fact, and during the day the cage-maker told about twenty bird-fanciers who came in on business that he could put them in the way of a customer — meaning my wife. “She wants a little bird,” he said.

Well, I woke next morning a little earlier than usual, and with a vague general feeling that I was somewhere in the country — probably at my uncle’s. All the air outside seemed to be full of twittering, just as I remembered hearing in the early mornings at my uncle’s place in the country where sparrows were as thick as the leaves in the ivy on the house, and the robins and wrens, and those kinds of birds, used to swarm in the shrubbery. My wife was awake too, and as soon as she found me stirring she began (as she does on most mornings) to tell me a dream. I always find that other people’s dreams haven’t, as a rule, much plot in them, and so they don’t tell well. Things always seem to come about and end up somehow without much reason.

And what my wife’s dream was about I did not exactly understand at the time, but it was about the Tropical Court at the Crystal Palace. She dreamt that it was on fire, and all the parrots had gone mad with fright and were flying about, and so she ran down to the station, with all the creatures after her; but there was no room for her in the train, as all the parrots, and lovebirds, and lories, and paroquets, and cockatoos, and macaws of the Palace were scrambling for places, and there was such a noise and flurrying of feathers she was quite bewildered; and though she told the guard that