claws, and she liked Cynthia's story about him better than the
gorgeous actuality of the bird himself. She shrank back from that
shrieking splendor, clinging with strong talons to his cage wires,
against which he pressed cruelly his red breast and beat his
gold-green wings, and through which he thrust his hooked beak, and
glared with his yellow eyes.

Ellen fairly sobbed at last when the parrot thrust out a wicked and
deceiving claw towards her, and said something in his unearthly
shriek which seemed to have a distinct reference to her, and fired
at her a volley of harsh "How do's" and "Good-mornings," and
"Good-nights," and "Polly want a cracker's," then finished with a
wild shriek of laughter, her note of human grief making a curious
chord with the bird's of inhuman mirth. "I want my mother!" she
panted out, and wept, and would not be comforted. Then Cynthia took
her away from the parrot and produced the doll. Then truly did the
sentiment of emulative motherhood in her childish breast console her
for the time for her need of her own mother. Such a doll as that she
had never seen, not even in the store-windows at Christmas-time.
Still, she had very fine dolls for a little girl whose relatives
were not wealthy, but this doll was like a princess, and nearly as
large as Ellen.

Ellen held out her arms for this ravishing creature in a French
gown, looked into its countenance of unflinching infantile grace and
amiability and innocence, and her fickle heart betrayed her, and she
laughed with delight, and the tension of anxiety relaxed in her
face.

"Where is her mother?" she asked of Cynthia, having a very firm