I had some occasion--I forget what--to step into the courtyard, as I settled this account, and remember I walked downstairs in no small triumph with the conceit of my reasoning. “Beshrew the _somber_ pencil!” said I vauntingly; “for I envy not its power, which paints the evils of life with so hard and deadly a coloring. The mind sits terrified at the objects she has magnified herself and blackened. Reduce them to their proper size and hue, she overlooks them. ’Tis true,” said I, correcting the proposition, “the Bastille is not an evil to be despised. But strip it of its towers, fill up the fosse, unbarricade the doors, call it simply a confinement, and suppose ’tis some tyrant of a distemper, and not of a man, which holds you in it, the evil vanishes and you bear the other half without complaint.” I was interrupted in the heyday of this soliloquy with a voice which I took to be that of a child, which complained it could not get out. I looked up and down the passage, and, seeing neither man, woman, nor child, I went out without further attention. In my return back through the passage, I heard the same words repeated twice over; and, looking up, I saw it was a starling, hung in a little cage. “I can’t get out--I can’t get out,” said the starling. I stood looking at the bird; and to every person who came through the passage it ran fluttering to the side towards which they approached it, with the same lamentation of its captivity. “I can’t get out,” said the starling. “God help thee!” said I; “but I’ll let thee out, cost what it will.” So I turned about the cage to get the door. It was twisted and double twisted so fast with wire there was no getting it open without pulling the cage to pieces. I took both hands to it. The bird flew to the place where I was attempting his deliverance, and, thrusting his head through the trellis, pressed his breast against it, as if impatient. “I fear, poor creature,” said I, “I cannot set thee at liberty.” “No,” said the starling; “I can’t get out--I can’t get out.” I never had my affections more tenderly awakened, nor do I remember an incident in my life where the dissipated spirits to which my reason had been a bubble were so suddenly called home. Mechanical as the notes were, yet so true in tune to nature were they chanted, that in one moment they overthrew all my systematic reasonings upon the Bastille; and I heavily walked upstairs, unsaying every word I had said in going down them.