be a right man, be his mother's darling, and more, his father's
pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever
fresh born.

Curdie had made himself a bow and some arrows, and was teaching
himself to shoot with them. One evening in the early summer, as he
was walking home from the mine with them in his hand, a light
flashed across his eyes. He looked, and there was a snow-white
pigeon settling on a rock in front of him, in the red light of the
level sun. There it fell at once to work with one of its wings, in
which a feather or two had got some sprays twisted, causing a
certain roughness unpleasant to the fastidious creature of the air.

It was indeed a lovely being, and Curdie thought how happy it must
be flitting through the air with a flash - a live bolt of light.
For a moment he became so one with the bird that he seemed to feel
both its bill and its feathers, as the one adjusted the other to
fly again, and his heart swelled with the pleasure of its
involuntary sympathy. Another moment and it would have been aloft
in the waves of rosy light - it was just bending its little legs to
spring: that moment it fell on the path broken-winged and bleeding
from Curdie's cruel arrow.

With a gush of pride at his skill, and pleasure at his success, he
ran to pick up his prey. I must say for him he picked it up gently
- perhaps it was the beginning of his repentance. But when he had
the white thing in his hands its whiteness stained with another red
than that of the sunset flood in which it had been revelling - ah
God! who knows the joy of a bird, the ecstasy of a creature that
has neither storehouse nor barn! - when he held it, I say, in his