It was Thursday, August 3, 1905. We (that is, Scraggles and I) had had a good day together. We went out and I dug worms for her, and she seemed happy and improving in health and appearance. During the day she followed me out to the bath-room and all around several times, and when I went to lie down and read she came and insisted upon my holding her, or allowing her to sit on my hand. When I moved to turn the page she jumped upon my sleeve and hopped up to my shoulder and neck, where she stayed for half an hour or more. This was a new trick, learned only a few days before, and several times she hopped up from my desk, when I put her off the paper as I wrote, and perched quite contentedly on my shoulder or squatted on the back of my neck.

Several times during the day she had begged to be taken up and had fussed around my pencils, and once or twice had fought my pen as I wrote. Placing her on my lap, she snuggled down there contentedly until some movement disturbed her. Once, and the only time I knew her to do it, she tried to fly up from my lap to the desk. When she failed she looked up with such a queer expression that I could not help putting down my hand for her, into which she immediately hopped.

We had had a good two hours together after lunch, when I put her down, and soon she was hopping about the room. After feeding herself she came and perched in her usual place on my foot, but I must have forgotten her for a moment. My brain was much occupied with an important chapter of my book, and jumping up hastily I stepped to the book-case to the left of my desk to consult some volume, and almost as soon as I did so looked around to see where Scraggles was. I looked towards her sand bath and the food saucers, then to her little tree, but she was not to be seen. Then, as I often did, I tilted back my chair to see if she was at my feet, and to my intense distress I saw her there dead, on the bear skin I used as a rug.

There are some griefs that seem puerile. I suppose mine will over this poor, scraggedy, helpless little bird, yet I felt at that moment as I have felt often since, that there are many men I could far better spare than her,—many men with whom two months’ daily association would teach me less than did this little, raggedy, ailing song-sparrow. Her cheerfulness, her courage, her dauntlessness, her self-reliance, her perfect trust and confidence, her evident affection, were all lessons to remain in memory. After she had once given her trust, it never failed. I could handle my books, moving them to and fro over her, placing them anywhere near her, and there was not the slightest evidence of fear; and if anything did alarm her and she could get into my hand and feel its firmness around her, all tremors ceased. With her tiny head protruding from the clenched hand, her bright eyes looking now this way, now that, she watched intently, but without fear, confident in the protecting power of her big friend. And I felt the trust, the confidence reposed in me, the affection, and it drew from me a response totally at variance with the size of the tiny creature.

We buried her where she and I had gone daily, I to dig, she to eat whatever I found that she liked. My daughter lined the little grave appropriately with the beautiful white blossoms known as bird-cages,—lace-like, delicate, and exquisite,—and as we crumbled the earth over her tiny feathered little body, need I be ashamed to confess that tears fell, even as they do now as I write?