Innocent Birds Read Free Page B

yours truly ,                    Agnes Pettifer.’
    Two months after his wedding, Mr. Pim, having gone to market with three of Farmer Barfoot’s fat hogs, met Miss Pettifer in the Weyminster High Street, and touching his hat with extreme reverence, thanked her for her letter.
    Miss Pettifer, who had just threatened to put her new servant, Miss Parsons, and her tin box into the road, looked kindly at Pim, and asked if there was anything she could do to help his wife.
    Pim, seeing so much friendliness in Miss Pettifer, and thinking her a very learned lady as well as a kind one, asked her a simple question that had troubled him during many a married night. ‘Be thik the notion?’ Mr. Pim had ended the conversation very simply by saying.
    Instead of answering Pim, as any decent lady who was well over forty would have done, by either saying that she didn’t know, or else that as far as her own learning went he had done as well as a man could, and should leave the rest to nature, Miss Pettifer threw her glove at him, and went to a policeman, who smilingly informed Pim ‘that questions of they sorts were best left for inn parlours.’
    Mr. Pim ruefully entered the Unicorn.

Chapter iv
SOLLY’S BOOK
    S UMMER days are more pleasantly spent in Madder than elsewhere, because whichever way you may turn, provided you don’t turn to the rectory, there are lambs skipping, larks singing , cows modestly feeding, now in the shadow and now in the sun, and horses that regard the meadows as their own.
    Rabelais of Chinon in France had a simple modest word of praise to give to the little town where he lived—and if we do but borrow we harm no one. For if we look up in Madder, too, there is the hill, and if we look down there are the meadows. Though one isn’t a happy cow, one can chew the green grass and buttercups as well as they, by merely looking, and so become nearly as modest and ruminatingly happy as a beast. If the days go by and we do nothing more than watch, as Mr. Solly did when he had planted his garden, we should be no less happy than the daisies that only grow, whiten the green for a little, and then sink into the earth again, as we must all do. Mr. Solly looked at the simple green things of Madder, that most people take so little thought of, because he was there for that very purpose—to see what would happen. Andas he knew that the moon daisies must know all about ‘that cloud’ as well as Aunt Crocker, he watched and walked in the fields as well as regarding the men and women that he met. Solly had not been at Madder very long before the green fields as well as the lane that led him there took the form in his imagination, confirmed by Mrs. Crocker’s vision, of holy ground. A long time had been spent by some one in making them exactly what they were, and in making them so suitable for a good gift. God’s gift Solly knew would be a pretty one, a present worth the waiting for through a few dark winter days and summer sultry ones. Solly would see the new spring colour that made of Madder a patchwork quilt; and also note the time of the fall, when the dyed garment of Madder took a more natural and earthly colour that, besides a nice coolness of texture, remains the longest.
    Mr. Solly’s white pinks were so fine when July came in, that every one said that, though the late occupier of the cottage—Minnie Cuddy—had some very beautiful white hens, yet Mr. Solly’s white pinks were even more lovely. The scent of these white pinks now came into Solly’s open window, as well as a white butterfly, that flew in for no better reason than to settle for a moment upon the book that Mr. Solly had before him. Perhaps the butterfly had a mind to know from Mr. Solly what the book was about, for itremained settled there until Solly took it up and put it gently out of the window.
    Mr. Solly opened the book, now that the butterfly was gone to the pinks again. The book was A