"On my soul! You have got it, honey! That's what he's saying,
plain as gospel! I can tell it plainer'n anything he's sung yet,
now I sense it."

He gathered Maria in his arms, pressed her head against his
breast with a trembling old hand, while the face he turned to the
morning was beautiful.

"I wish to God," he said quaveringly, "'at every creature on
earth was as well fixed as me an' the redbird!" Clasping each
other, they listened with rapt faces, as, mellowing across the
corn field, came the notes of the Cardinal: "So dear! So dear!"

After that Abram's devotion to his bird family became a mild
mania. He carried food to the top rail of the line fence every
day, rain or shine, with the same regularity that he curried and
fed Nancy in the barn. From caring for and so loving the
Cardinal, there grew in his tender old heart a welling flood of
sympathy for every bird that homed on his farm.

He drove a stake to mark the spot where the killdeer hen brooded
in the corn field, so that he would not drive Nancy over the
nest. When he closed the bars at the end of the lane, he always
was careful to leave the third one down, for there was a chippy
brooding in the opening where it fitted when closed. Alders and
sweetbriers grew in his fence corners undisturbed that spring if
he discovered that they sheltered an anxious-eyed little mother.
He left a square yard of clover unmowed, because it seemed to him
that the lark, singing nearer the Throne than any other bird, was