hands of a little blackguard, perfect in all sorts of cruelty to animals: all
I should like to know is, how the story will end."

The two schoolboys, the proprietors now of the transformed clerk, carried him
into an elegant room. A stout stately dame received them with a smile; but she
expressed much dissatisfaction that a common field-bird, as she called the
lark, should appear in such high society. For to-day, however, she would allow
it; and they must shut him in the empty cage that was standing in the window.
"Perhaps he will amuse my good Polly," added the lady, looking with a
benignant smile at a large green parrot that swung himself backwards and
forwards most comfortably in his ring, inside a magnificent brass-wired cage.
"To-day is Polly's birthday," said she with stupid simplicity: "and the little
brown field-bird must wish him joy."

Mr. Polly uttered not a syllable in reply, but swung to and fro with dignified
condescension; while a pretty canary, as yellow as gold, that had lately been
brought from his sunny fragrant home, began to sing aloud.

"Noisy creature! Will you be quiet!" screamed the lady of the house, covering
the cage with an embroidered white pocket handkerchief.

"Chirp, chirp!" sighed he. "That was a dreadful snowstorm"; and he sighed
again, and was silent.

The copying-clerk, or, as the lady said, the brown field-bird, was put into a
small cage, close to the Canary, and not far from "my good Polly." The only
human sounds that the Parrot could bawl out were, "Come, let us be men!"
Everything else that he said was as unintelligible to everybody as the
chirping of the Canary, except to the clerk, who was now a bird too: he
understood his companion perfectly.