sounded like “Peep! peep!” to the boy, who thumped the bird on its beak
and walked off with it.
On the avenue this boy met with two other schoolboys. Socially, they
were of the upper classes, though, properly ranked according to their merit,
they were in the lowest class at school. They bought the bird for eight
pennies, and in their hands the clerk came back to Copenhagen, to a family
who lived in Gothers Street.
“It's a good thing I'm only dreaming this,” said the clerk, “or I'd be
furious. First I was a poet, and now I'm a lark. It must have been my poetic
temperament which turned me into this little creature. It is a very sad state
of affairs, especially when one falls into the hands of a couple of boys. But I
wonder how it will all turn out.”
The boys carried him into a luxuriously appointed room, where a stout,
affable lady received them. She was not at all pleased with their common
little field bird, as she called the lark, but she said that, for one day only,
they could keep it in the empty cage near the window.
“Perhaps Polly will like it,” she said, and smiled at the large parrot that
swung proudly to and fro on the ring in his ornate brass cage. “It's Polly's
birthday,” she said, like a simpleton. “The little field bird wants to
congratulate him.”
Polly did not say a word, as proudly he swung back and forth. But a
pretty canary bird who had been brought here last summer from his warm,
sweet-scented homeland, began to sing at the top of his voice.
“Bawler!” the lady said, and threw a white handkerchief over his cage.
“Peep, peep. What a terrible snowstorm,” the canary sighed, and with that
sigh he kept quiet.
The clerk, or as the lady called him, the field bird, was put in a cage next
to the canary's and not far from the parrot's. The only human words that the
parrot could say, and which at times sounded quite comical, were “Come
now, let us be men.” All the rest of his chatter made as little sense as the
