118                       OUR FIRST CANARY.

towards us, we stopped instinctively to ask if she wanted anything.

The men had dropped behind. She seemed, what she would herself have called, " flurried," and told us with much earnestness and the most perfect simplicity, how those rough men had wanted to make her sell a bird she had in her hand, and that she would not do it, as she did not like their looks; and opening a small paper bag, she showed us the head and shoulders of a very large and very yellow canary.

Her mistress, it appeared, had borne the singing of that bird until she could bear it no more (" it was a wonderful bird for singing"), and now, this very morning, she had ordered the bird out of the house altogether; and so, screwed up in that wretched little paper-bag, its flurried and anxious owner was going to take it somewhere where she hoped to sell it.

The end of it was, that in pure pity for the bird, who would certainly not survive much more of that bitter cold and the paper-bag together, we ransomed it at the cost of 3s. 6d., and at once turned homewards to put it in shelter and safety. But first, in passing the Langham Place Bazaar, we stopped to buy a cage, glasses, sand, seeds of all sorts—¦ in fact, everything a canary could possibly want.

Our bird's arrival at home was soon followed by that of his cage, but in the interim he had flown out of the paper-bag, and dashed against the window. From there, he flew round and round the room, and after some difficulty, was caught and kept quiet until his cage arrived.    We thought he would be