It is a novel and rather a laughable sensation to be taken in--completely sold--by a bird. How she managed it I cannot imagine, for it all happened under my eyes and I saw nothing, but one by one she must have enticed her family out into a most unattractive world some days before their time, alarmed at the shrouding mackintosh. The last had got only as far as the foot of the trellis when I found it. She had out-witted Providence. I sent for Atma and together we prowled and searched about the garden in the lessening rain. Presently he paused beside the closest tangles of the potato-creeper, “_Chupsie!_”[3] said he--the word was half a whisper, half a soft whistle--and bent down. I looked too, and there they sat in a row, three soft, surprised, obedient little feather-balls, well hidden, and waiting no doubt to see what in this astonishing wilderness would happen next. I got back to the window in time to receive the parent birds’ opinion of me, full-throated, unabridged. They poured it out from perches commanding the banksia, from which they could see the Thing removed and their premature flitting quite foolish and futile. Plainly they connected me with the horrid dream that for an hour had cloaked all their horizon, and it _was_ a murderous scolding. Ten days of steady rain and then this misfortune! Every other bird was silent in shelter, only these two poured forth their tale of dolorous injustice. What weather to be obliged to fledge in--pretty accommodation for a young family in a potato-creeper! Was I not aware that they had been brought up in the rains themselves, hatched exactly this time last year? Could I not conceive that they might be able to mind their own business? “When you have quite finished,” I whistled humbly, “I’ll explain,” but I couldn’t get a word in, as the saying is, edgeways, and finally I fled, leaving them still expressing their opinion of well-intentioned people. CHAPTER XVII We have arrived at September and the rains are “breaking.” For two months and a half they have trampled upon us steadily, armies on the march; now they come in scattered battalions and make off as if pursued. The attack, too, is as erratic; it will hammer hard upon the kitchen while not a drop falls on the verandah, or a great slant will sweep down the nearest valley while we look on in dry security from the shelf. Here in the garden a wall of mist will often surround me, with the sun shining brightly inside; it turns the shelf into a room, and makes one think of the impalpable barrier of one’s environment, possible to break in any direction but never broken, always there, the bound of one’s horizon and the limit of one’s activities. I wonder if Tiglath-Pileser will call that far-fetched.