Golden Bird and his family from localities which were separated as far as
is the East from the West. My company was responsible for my
light-heartedness at a time when I should have been weeping with vain
regrets at leaving life--and perhaps love, for I couldn't help hearing in
my mind's ears that great dangerous racer bearing Matthew away from me at
the rate of eighty miles an hour. I was figuring on just how long it would
take the five to eight hundred children of the Bird family, which I
expected to incarnate themselves out of egg-shells, to increase to a flock
of two thousand, from which, I was assured by the statistics in that very
reliable book, I ought to make three thousand dollars a year, maybe five,
with "good management." Also I was not at all worried about the "good
management" to be employed. I intended to begin to exert it the minute of
my arrival in the township of Riverfield. I had even already begun to use
"thoughtful care," for I had brought a box of tea biscuits along, and I
felt a positive thrill of affection for Mr. G. Bird as he gratefully
gobbled a crushed one from my hand. Also it was dear of him the way he
raised his proud head and chuckled to his brides in the crate behind him
to come and get their share. It was pathetic the way he called and called
and they answered, until I finally stopped their mouths with ten other
dainties, so that he could consume his in peace. Even at that early stage
of our friendship I liked the Golden Bird, and perhaps it was just a wave
of prophetic psychology that made me feel so warmly towards the proud,
white young animal who was to lead me to--

So instead of the despair due the occasion, I was happy as I jogged slowly
out over the twenty long miles that stretched out like a silvery ribbon
dropped down upon the meadows and fields that separate the proud city of
Hayesville and the gray and green little old hamlet of Riverfield, which
nestles in a bend of the Cumberland River and sleeps time away under its
huge old oak and elm and hackberry trees, kept perpetually green by the