The
Gipsy Nearest To The Earth Was The Best Off In Every Way; Yet Not Even
For Primitive Man And Woman Did The Winds Cease.
Broad flakes of snow
drifted up against the low tent, beneath which the babes were nestling to
the breast.
Not even for the babes did the snow cease or the keen wind
rest; the very fire could scarcely struggle against it. Snow-rain and
ice-rain; frost-formed snow-granules, driven along like shot, stinging
and rattling against the tent-cloth, hissing in the fire; roar and groan
of the great wind among the oaks of the forest. No kindness to man, from
birth-hour to ending; neither earth, sky, nor gods care for him, innocent
at the mother's breast. Nothing good to man but man. Let man, then, leave
his gods and lift up his ideal beyond them.
Something grey and spotted and puffy, not unlike a toad, moved about
under the gorse of the garden hedge one morning, half hidden by the
stalks of old grasses. By-and-by it hopped out - the last thrush, so
distended with puffed feathers against the frost as to be almost
shapeless. He searched about hopelessly round the stones and in the
nooks, all hard and frostbound; there was the shell of a snail, dry and
whitened and empty, as was apparent enough even at a distance. His keen
eye must have told him that it was empty; yet such was his hunger and
despair that he took it and dashed it to pieces against a stone. Like a
human being, his imagination was stronger than his experience; he tried
to persuade himself that there might be something there; hoping against
hope. Mind, you see, working in the bird's brain, and overlooking facts.
A mere mechanism would have left the empty and useless shell
untouched - would have accepted facts at once, however bitter, just as the
balance on the heaviest side declines immediately, obeying the fact of an
extra grain of weight. The bird's brain was not mechanical, and therefore
he was not wholly mastered by experience. It was a purely human
action - just what we do ourselves. Next he came across to the door to see
if a stray berry still remained on a creeper. He saw me at the window,
and he came to the window - right to it - and stopped and looked full at me
some minutes, within touch almost, saying as plainly as could be said, 'I
am starving - help me.' I never before knew a thrush make so unmistakable
an appeal for assistance, or deliberately approach so near (unless
previously encouraged). We tried to feed him, but we fear little of the
food reached him. The wonder of the incident was that a thrush should
still be left - there had not been one in the garden for two months.
Berries all gone, ground hard and foodless, streams frozen, snow lying
for weeks, frost stealing away the vital heat - ingenuity could not devise
a more terrible scene of torture to the birds.
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