The hummingbird was ready for me. I will not try to tell how lifelike and
beautiful the artist had made it. Even with him I took pains to be
somewhat reserved. As I stood holding and admiring the small green wonder,
I remarked that I was near having to bring him that morning another and
yet finer bird. A shade of displeasure (and, I feared, of suspicion also)
came to his face as he asked me how that was. I explained.
Going into my front hall, whose veranda-door framed in a sunny picture of
orange-boughs, jasmine-vines, and white-clouded blue sky, I had found a
male ruby-throat circling about the ceiling, not wise enough to stoop, fly
low, and pass out by the way it had come in. It occurred to me that it
might be the mate of the one already mine. For some time all the efforts I
could contrive, either to capture or free it, were vain. Round and round
it flew, silently beating and bruising its exquisite little head against
the lofty ceiling, the glory of its luminous red throat seeming to
heighten into an expression of unspeakable agony. At last Mrs. Smith ran
for a long broom, and, as in her absence I stood watching the self-snared
captive's struggle, the long, tiny beak which had never done worse than go
twittering with rapture to the grateful hearts of thousands of flowers,
began to trace along the smooth, white ceiling a scarlet thread of pure
heart's blood. The broom came. I held it up, the flutterer lighted upon
it, and at first slowly, warily, and then triumphantly, I lowered it under
the lintel out into the veranda, and the bird darted away into the garden
and was gone like a soul into heaven.
In the middle of my short recital Manouvrier had sunk down upon the arm of
his wife's rocking-chair with one huge hand on both of hers folded over
her sewing, and as I finished he sat motionless, still gazing into my
face.
"But," I started, with sudden pretence of business impulse, "how much am I
to pay?"
He rose, slowly, and looked dreamily at his wife; she smiled at him, and
he grunted,
"Nut'n'."
"Oh, my friend," I laughed, "that's absurd!"
But he had no reply, and his wife, as she resumed her sewing, said,
sweetly, as if to her needle, "Ah, I think Pastropbon don't got to charge
nut'n' if he don't feel like." And I could not move them.
As I was leaving them, a sudden conjecture came to me.
"Did those birthday numbers bring you any luck?"
The taxidermist shook his head, good-naturedly, but when his wife laughed
he turned upon her.
"Wait! I dawn't be done wid doze number' yet."
I guessed that, having failed with them in the daily drawings, he would
shift the figures after some notion of magical significance and venture a
ticket, whole or fractional, in the monthly drawing.
Scarcely ten days after, as I sat at breakfast with my newspaper spread
beside my plate, I fairly spilled my coffee as my eye fell upon the name
of P.T.B. Manouvrier, of No.--St. Peter Street. Old Pastropbon had drawn
seventy-five thousand dollars in the lottery.