A morning or two ago, when I heard against the pane the soft thud of an eager little body, I hurried out to see lying under the window an oriole. It was too terrible that it should have been an oriole. For days I had seen him hanging here and there, back downward, on this limb and that, and heard his full-throated note ringing from the innermost air, so that the deeps of air could never again be wholly alien to me. And now he lay, his wings outstretched, his eyes dim, his breast hardly moving. I watched him, hoping for the breath to begin to flutter and labour. But though the great Nature was with him, herself passioning in all the little fibres to keep life pulsing on, yet her passion was not enough; and while I looked the little life went out. ... I held the tiny body in my hand, and it was almost as if the difference between living and not living slipped through my fingers and was gone. If only that one within me, who watches between the seeing and the knowing, had been a little quicker, I might almost have understood.... "Them little things go out like a match," said my neighbour. She was standing on the other side of the box hedge, and I caught a look on her face that I had seen there once or twice before, so that my heart had warmed to her; and now, because of that look, she fitted within the moment like the right word. "It don't seem like anybody could _mean_ 'em to die before their time," she said. "Ain't it almost as if it happened when Everything somehow couldn't help it?" It was this, the tragedy of the Unfulfilled Intention, that was in my mind while I hollowed the little grave under the hedge. And when we had finished, my neighbour, who had stepped informally over the box to help me, looked up with a return of that fleeting expression which I had noted. "I guess we've found one now for sure," she said. "Found one?" I puzzled. "I thought you knew," she told me. "I thought everybody knew--we've been looking for one so long. For a baby."