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Second in the blue-jay's affection was a lady to whom at first he took a great dislike. She tried her best to win him, talking to him, treating him to various tidbits, and offering him the hospitality of her room, separated from the bird-room by a passage, and above all dancing with him.
The girl wiped her hands, crossed her feet on the little island of carpet where she was stranded in a sea of soap-suds, and then, sure enough, out of her slender throat came the swallow's twitter, the robin's whistle, the blue-jay's call, the thrush's song, the wood-dove's coo, and many another familiar note, all ending as before with the musical ecstacy of a bobolink singing and swinging among the meadow grass on a bright June day.
O Sahib, go cry unto Gunga, go accuse the greedy river, and say to the envious waters, "Give back my boy!" She had left him sitting on a stone, she says, counting the sailing corpses, while she went to find him a blue-jay's nest among the rocks; when she returned to the stone, no Jonnee Sahib! "My golden image, who hath snatched him away?
She took me for you, or pretended to." The color dropped from Ruth's cheek. "Took you for me?" he asked, with an awkward laugh. "Yes," sneered Rand; "chirped and chattered away about OUR picnic, OUR nose-gays, and lord knows what! Said she'd keep them blue-jay's wings, and wear 'em in her hat. Spouted poetry, too, the same sort o' rot you get off now and then."
A blue-jay's one of the worst, and my, how the other birds hate him! Once I saw a whole crowd of 'em chasing a jay. It was a reg'lar bird mob, all kinds in it, thrushes and cat-birds, and robins, and song-sparrows. They were all small birds 'longside of the jay, but together they were too much for him, I can tell you.
In winter the first snows mark it with a white line; as you wander through you hear the blue-jay's cry, and see the hurrying flight of the sparrow; the graceful outlines of the leafless bushes are revealed, and the clinging bird's-nests, "leaves that do not fall," give happy memories of summer homes. Thus Nature meets man half-way.
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