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The young soldier dreamed only of a love affair like twenty others which had made the pastime of his oft-changing quarters; but this "dear woman," Sophie Victoire Antoinette Delaborde, daughter of an old bird-fancier, was destined to become his wife, and the mother of his daughter, Aurore Dupin, whom the world knows as George Sand. The circumstances of her youth had been untoward.
"If I were able, I would accompany you myself, my dear, for poor Marriott's sake, though I would almost as soon go to the Augean stable." There was a bird-fancier in High Holborn, who had bought several of the hundred and eighty beautiful birds, which, as the newspapers of the day advertised, had been "collected, after great labour and expense, by Mons.
He crams this part, and starves that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his fitness and strength. But Shakspeare has no peculiarity, no importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities: no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small, subordinately.
Wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper: every room let out to a different family, and in many instances to two or even three—fruit and ‘sweet-stuff’ manufacturers in the cellars, barbers and red-herring vendors in the front parlours, cobblers in the back; a bird-fancier in the first floor, three families on the second, starvation in the attics, Irishmen in the passage, a ‘musician’ in the front kitchen, and a charwoman and five hungry children in the back one—filth everywhere—a gutter before the houses and a drain behind—clothes drying and slops emptying, from the windows; girls of fourteen or fifteen, with matted hair, walking about barefoot, and in white great-coats, almost their only covering; boys of all ages, in coats of all sizes and no coats at all; men and women, in every variety of scanty and dirty apparel, lounging, scolding, drinking, smoking, squabbling, fighting, and swearing.
He is somewhat noted in that neighbourhood for giving the police trouble. Not a bad-hearted fellow, I believe, but full of mischief, and has been brought up among thieves from his birth. His father is, or was, a bird-fancier and seller of penny articles on the streets, besides being a professional pugilist. You will be the better for protection there, sir. I would advise you not to go alone.
He spoke to me indeed, nay condescended to repeat two or three of the newest literary anecdotes that had been retailed to him from the blue-stocking-club, and then civilly dismissed me to give audience to a Dutch bird-fancier, who had brought him a piping bulfinch. But I saw him no more, he was never afterward at home.
So when Mr Pecksniff drove up in the hackney cab, Mrs Gamp's curtains were drawn close, and Mrs Gamp was fast asleep behind them. If the bird-fancier had been at home, as he ought to have been, there would have been no great harm in this; but he was out, and his shop was closed.
"For instance, now a priori, one should not insist upon a great painter's being a good ornithologist, and yet, for want of being something of a bird-fancier, look here what he has done quite absurd, a sort of hawk introduced, such as never was or could be at any hawking affair in nature: would not sit upon lady's wrist or answer to her call would never fly at a bird.
The blue jay belongs to the crow family, and has all the brains of his black-coated and more sedate cousins. At the North, he will, like a squirrel, lay up for winter a hoard of acorns and beech mast. An experienced bird-fancier asserts that he found the jay 'more ingenious, cunning, and teachable than any other species of birds that he had ever attempted to instruct.
I have pointed out the distinguishing characteristics of the itinerant bird-fancier; and, should you never have seen him before, you will be able at once to recognise him in case of your possibly encountering him in the future. Well, one day, meeting this gentleman "drumming around" our suburb, I had the curiosity to stop and inspect his live freight.
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