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I was most impressed with the exceeding mildness and placidity of their demeanor; as if they had time enough, plenty to eat, and nothing to fear. Their only notes were in quality much like the goldfinch's, and hardly louder, but without his characteristic inflection.
Any who do not know how sweet the goldfinch's note is may get some conception of the effect of such a concert if they will imagine fifty canaries thus engaged out-of-doors. I declared then that I had never heard anything so enchanting, and I am not certain even now that I was over-enthusiastic.
Nothing pleased the thrasher more than watching other birds; he observed them closely, especially liking to stand on top of a cage and see the life below, an agitated life it was apt to be when he was there. Thus he sometimes stood on the goldfinch's cage and noticed every motion with great interest, yet with an indescribably ironical air, as if he said, "My dear sir, is that the way you eat?"
The barber's nimble apprentice hung the towel and basin at the door, while his master, wearied by the wine-bibbing and talk at the tavern or his labour at the fire, was still asleep. His active wife had risen before him, strewed the shop with fresh sand, and renewed the goldfinch's food.
It is supposed that she is old Goldfinch's daughter, and that he won't give her a farthing; but I know somebody who knows his lawyer, and that girl will have half a million, if she don't drink herself to death before old Goldfinch takes his departure from this wicked world.
Therefore, happening to remember, I stopped at my tool-house, where I keep a little of everything, and took from a peg a fine old specimen of a goldfinch's nest. This I fastened to the end of the pole, and hiding my note in it, now felt better satisfied.
If the dainty creature would bear confinement, on which point I know nothing, he would make an ideal parlor songster; for his voice, while round and full, in contrast with the goldfinch's, for example, is yet, even at its loudest, of a wonderful softness and delicacy. Nevertheless, I trust that nobody will ever cage him.
Georgiana's behavior then was merely the forerunner of larger marvels. For next morning I wrote a futile drastic treatise on Woman's inability to understand Man and Man's inability to understand Himself, and set it under her window. It made such a roll of paper that the goldfinch's nest looked as though it were distent with a sort of misshapen ostrich egg.
It has attracted no end of attention from the birds of the neighborhood, however, who never saw a goldfinch's nest swung to the end of a leafless pole and placed where it could be so exactly reached by the human hand. In particular it has fallen under the notice of a pair of wrens, which are like women, in that they usually have some secret business behind their curiosity.
It was a quiet and pretty place enough; full of thickets, as I have said, where the birds built unmolested there was generally a goldfinch's nest there. "It became necessary to lay a drain across it, and a big trench was dug. One day they came and told me that the workmen had found something would I go and look at it?
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