A loud laugh from Adam proved at once to Katie that she had neither offended nor convinced him by her arguments.
But all real or imaginary differences between the Sergeant and his wife about the starling, ended with the death of their boy. What that was to them both, parents only who have lost a child--an only child--can tell. It "cut up", as they say, the Sergeant terribly. Katie seemed suddenly to become old. She kept all her boy’s clothes in a press, and it was her wont for a time to open it as if for worship, every night, and to "get her greet out". The Sergeant never looked into it. Once, when his wife awoke at night and found him weeping bitterly, he told his first and only fib; for he said that he had an excruciating headache. A headache! He would no more have wept for a headache of his own than he would for one endured by his old foe, Napoleon.
This great bereavement made the starling a painful but almost a holy remembrancer of the child. "I’m Charlie’s bairn!" was a death-knell in the house. When repeated, no comment was made. It was generally heard in silence; but one day, Adam and his wife were sitting at the fireside taking their meal in a sad mood, and the starling, perhaps under the influence of hunger, or--who knows?--from an uneasy instinctive sense of the absence of the child, began to repeat rapidly the sentence, "I’m Charlie’s bairn!" The Sergeant rose and went to its cage with some food, and said, with as much earnestness as if the bird had understood him, "Ay, ye’re jist _his_ bairn, and ye’ll be _my_ bairn tae as lang as ye live!"
"A man’s a man for a’ that!" quoth the bird.
It was a beautiful Sunday morning in spring. The dew was glittering on every blade of grass; the trees were bursting into buds for coming leaves, or into flower for coming fruit; the birds were "busy in the wood" building their nests, and singing jubilate; the streams were flashing to the sea; the clouds, moisture laden, were moving across the blue heavens, guided by the winds; and signs of life, activity, and joy filled the earth and sky.
The Sergeant hung out Charlie in his cage to enjoy the air and sunlight. He had not of late been so lively as usual; his confession as to his parentage was more hesitating; and when giving his testimony as to a man being a man, or as to the exclusive right of Charlie to be king, he often paused as if in doubt. All his utterances were accompanied by a spasmodic chirp and jerk, evidencing a great indifference to humanity. A glimpse of nature might possibly recover him. And so it did; for he had not been long outside before he began to spread his wings and tail feathers to the warm sun, and to pour out more confessions and testimonies than had been heard for weeks.