He was about a year old when it happened, and the fight took place a long way from his native heath. He was spending the summer at a pleasant country home in Pennsylvania. He had appeared to take just as much delight in the clover fields and mansion-studded hills of this lovely region as in the lonesome forests and sandy levels of his native land. He had sung, and sung: even in his dreams at night his sensitive little soul would often get quite too full and he would pour forth rapturous bursts of sentiment at any time between twelve o'clock and daybreak. If our health had been as little troubled by broken slumber as was his, these melodies in the late night would have been glorious; but there were some of us who had gone into the country especially to sleep; and we were finally driven to swing the sturdy songster high up in our outside porch at night, by an apparatus contrived with careful reference to cats. Several of these animals in the neighborhood had longed unspeakably for Bob ever since his arrival. We had seen them eyeing him from behind bushes and through windows, and had once rescued him from one who had thrust a paw between the very bars of his cage. That cat was going to eat him, art and all, with no compunction in the world. His music seemed to make no more impression on cats than Keats's made on critics. If only some really discriminating person had been by with a shot-gun when The Quarterly thrust its paw into poor Endymion's cage! [Illustration: "For it was his own image in the looking-glass of a bureau"] [Illustration: "His bath"] [Illustration: "When he smoothed his feathers"]