Emily.—“Now the fire burns dimly, mama, and so it ought for such a melancholy story; and I feel quite sad enough to listen to the rest of what happened to our pretty little wrens; so pray, mama, begin.”
“One day we were sitting at the window sorting seeds to sow in your little gardens, when we heard a scrambling noise in the jessamine which runs up from the porch to my window, where we had just before left the pretty wrens, chirping and stretching their tiny wings to catch the warm sun-beams. The next moment a strange half-starved cat sprung from the jessamine, and crept along the turf till she reached the shrubbery, and then forcing herself through the bushes, hid herself from our sight.
“There was a cry of distress from all the little birds which had before been singing so merrily among the branches, and we saw the poor parent golden-crested wrens wheeling round and round in the air, and following the direction which the strange cat had taken. We remembered the poor goldfinches, so we guessed but too well what had happened. We ran up stairs, and there we heard a fluttering, and we dared scarcely look into the cage; but when we did look, there lay one poor pretty thing quite dead, with its breast all bleeding from a stab by the strange cat’s cruel claw, and the others were all beating the wires with their little gasping bills: in a few minutes two of them dropped down dead by the side of their little brother, and before night the last had pined itself to death.”