"Are those birds really blue?" asks my little boy.
"Sky-blue," I answer. "And utterly broken-hearted."
"Father, can't we go and look at the birds?"
"I don't think we will," I say. "Why should still more silly boys do so? You can't imagine how it goes to one's heart to look at those poor captive beasts."
"Take my advice and don't. The animals there are not the real animals, you see. They are ill and ugly and angry because of their captivity and their longing and their pain."
"Now let me tell you something. To go to the Zoological Gardens costs five cents for you and ten cents for me. That makes fifteen cents altogether, which is an awful lot of money. We won't go there now, but we'll buy the biggest money-box we can find: one of those money-boxes shaped like a pig. Then we'll put fifteen cents in it. And every Thursday we'll put fifteen cents in the pig. By-and-by, that will grow into quite a fortune: it will make such a lot of money that, when you are grown up, you can take a trip to Africa and go to the desert and hear the wild, the real lion roaring and tremble just like the people tremble down there. And you can go to the great, dark forests and see the real blue birds flying proud and free among the flowers. You can't think how glad you will be, how beautiful they will look and how they will sing to you. . . ."
"Father, I would rather go to the Zoological Gardens now."
My little boy does not understand a word of what I say. And I am at my wits' end.
"Shall we go and have some cakes at Josty's?" I ask.
"I would rather go to the Zoological Gardens."
I can read in his eyes that he is thinking of the captive lion. Ugly human instincts are waking up in his soul. The mouse is forgotten and the snail; and the chaffinches have built their nest to no purpose.
At last I get up and say, bluntly, without any further explanation:
"You are _not_ going to the Zoological Gardens. Now we'll go home."
And home we go. But we are not in a good temper.
Of course, I get over it and I buy an enormous money-box pig. Also we put the money into it and he thinks that most interesting.
But, later in the afternoon, I find him in the bed-room engaged in a piteous game.
He has built a cage, in which he has imprisoned the pig. He is teasing it and hitting it with his whip, while he keeps shouting to it: