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As a mother-bird, when her brood is assailed, goes forward to meet the enemy, or as a good shepherd stands forth between his flock and danger, so Jesus, when His captors drew nigh, threw Himself between them and His followers. It was partly with this in view that He went so boldly out and concentrated attention on Himself by the challenge, "Whom seek ye?"
The mother-bird then remarked, 'Truly, father! you were about to do a strange thing, and a terrible sin has been averted from you. Then the Simurgh flew off to a distance with the great stone and dropped it. It sank down to the very middle of the earth.
Then, one day, there had been a great chattering about the warm cup of milkweed fiber and thistle-down in the elder-bush, husky cheeping from the nest mingling with the joyous chirps of the mother-bird as she tilted and danced on its edge or fluttered ecstatically above it; and from the end of a swaying twig close by had swelled the proud song of the male. The big egg had hatched.
My foot was within a yard of the mother-bird before she flew. I wondered what a sharp eye would detect curious or characteristic in the ways of the bird, so I came to the place many times and had a look. It was always a task to separate the bird from her surroundings though I stood within a few feet of her, and knew exactly where to look.
See, and she held up a bunch of purple pasque-flowers and wood-sorrel, 'this is what I found in the wood, growing out of a rugged old dead root; and just by, sheltered by the threefold leaves of the alleluia-flower, was a bird's nest, the mother-bird on her eggs, watching me with the wise black eye that saw I would not hurt her.
This was no wounded leopard charging me; no mother-bear defending with her giant might a captured cub. It was only a mother-bird, the size of a wild duck, with swift wings at her command, hiding under those wings her own and another's young, and her own boundless fear! For the second time in my life I had taken captive with my bare hands a free wild bird. No, I had not taken her captive.
I held the letter loosely in my hands, and looked into vacancy, yet I saw the chaffinch's nest on the lichen-covered trunk of an old apple-tree opposite my window, and saw the mother-bird come fluttering in to feed her brood, and yet I did not see it, although it seemed to me afterwards as if I could have drawn every fibre, every feather.
He blinked reproachfully. "To get them back into their cages." For an instant Tabs nearly smiled. "And Adair is he the first wild beast we tackle? Have we got to get him back into the cage of matrimony? Tell me about Adair." "It was no cage." Sir Tobias spoke almost resentfully. "His home was a kind of nest and Phyllis was the mother-bird."
Parlin rode too; but Susy and Prudy walked. When they came to the tree which contained the birds' nest, Prudy parted the branches, but the nestlings were not to be seen; the mother-bird had gathered them under her wings, out of sight. "Hush!" whispered Susy; "hear them peep! Let's go; we'll frighten the old birdie out of her wits."
He rarely shot on the wing, preferring to pot his birds, which was not easy to do when the leaves were on, and accounted for the brood in the third ravine going so long unharmed; but the near prospect of other gunners finding them now, had stirred him to go after 'a mess o' birds. He had heard no roar of wings when the mother-bird led off her four survivors, so pocketed the two he had killed and returned to the shanty.
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