For our years in the city, however, we found David sufficient in himself. He has grown up like the Peon’s own son, sturdy, steady, large of body and of heart. He has stood well in his classes without much effort; but more because it is his disposition to do thoroughly whatever he does at all than because of any great love for books. He is deliberate in manner, and somewhat slow of speech; and his steady gray eyes seem made to look facts in the face. He has always moved in straight lines, mentally and physically, cutting through obstacles which Caro would flutter around in a twinkling; yet somehow he arrived at the goal in time to secure whatever he set out to obtain. He was rather too solemn as a child, and regarded me, apparently, somewhat as the Peon did at times, with an air of amused and affectionate tolerance. I used to hunt through his small personality for the spark of fun I was sure lay hidden there, and as the years passed I caught the glint of it more and more frequently; but it was really Caro who brought it out into the open, and set it, a perpetual signal, in his eyes. I found it easy to awaken in him my own love of outdoors, and together we made friends with such birds as could be enticed to our shady yard in the city’s outer circle. We were sworn comrades in our enmity to the English sparrows, and the bond of a common foe was one of the many things that drew us into a fellowship unusually close. The Peon used to say that no boy came to genuine manhood without something in the way of an evil to hate and to fight; and for my part I joyfully set up the English sparrows as the embodiment of all wickedness, to be destroyed beak and tail. My own objections to them were the result of long watching; but David’s hatred sprang to life full-fledged the morning we found four of the wretched bullies fighting one small chickadee, which hung head downward from a twig of privet, his eyes shut tight, his claws clenched, and his throat and breast exposed to his enemies’ vicious bills. I think some deep thirst for justice seized the child’s soul at sight of the helpless victim, and ever since he has been mindful of weak things in a way surprising in a boy so ruggedly strong. He has been wonderfully mindful of me, always. Long before we left the city I had learned to enjoy outdoors from a cot under the trees in the back yard. The pain which was to be by turns my companion, my jailer, and my emancipator had already laid upon me an iron hand. I was up and about when the Peon was at home; but when he came in unexpectedly he learned to look for me under the drooping silver maples in the yard; and my old-time love of birds was an easy explanation of the many-cushioned cot and the long hours I daily spent upon it.