I
One day a hummingbird got caught in a cobweb in our greenhouse. It had no
real need to seek that damp, artificial heat. We were in the very heart of
that Creole summer-time when bird-notes are many as the sunbeams. The
flowers were in such multitude they seemed to follow one about, offering
their honeys and perfumes and begging to be gathered. Our little boy saw
the embodied joy fall, a joy no longer, seized it, and clasping it too
tightly, brought it to me dead.
He cried so over the loss that I promised to have the body stuffed. This
is how I came to know Manouvrier, the Taxidermist in St. Peter Street.
I passed his place twice before I found it. The front shop was very small,
dingily clean and scornfully unmercantile. Of the very few specimens of
his skill to be seen round about not one was on parade, yet everyone was
somehow an achievement, a happy surprise, a lasting delight. I admit that
taxidermy is not classed among the fine arts; but you know there is a way
of making everything--anything--an art instead of a craft or a commerce,
and such was the way of this shop's big, dark, hairy-faced, shaggy-headed
master. I saw his unsmiling face soften and his eye grow kind as mine
lighted up with approbation of his handiwork.
When I handed him the hummingbird he held it tenderly in his wide palm,
and as I was wondering to myself how so huge a hand as that could
manipulate frail and tiny things and bring forth delicate results, he
looked into my face and asked, with a sort of magisterial gentleness:
"How she git kill', dat lill' bird?"
I told him. I could feel my mood and words take their tone from him,
though he outwardly heard me through with no show of feeling; and when I
finished, I knew we were friends. I presently ventured to praise the
specimen of his skill nearest at hand; a wild turkey listening alarmedly
as if it would the next instant utter that ringing "quit!" which makes
each separate drop of a hunter's blood tingle. But with an odd languor in
his gravity, he replied:
"Naw, dass not well make; lill' bit worse, bad enough to put in front
window. I take you inside; come."