The Neighboring Families

I'd have plucked them myself, if they hadn't been so large."

"I'll pluck them!" said the smallest sparrow, who had no feathers of his own yet.

In the farmhouse lived two young married people, who were very devoted to each other; they were industrious and healthy, and everything was very neat in their house. Sunday morning the young wife went out and gathered a handful of the loveliest roses, put them in a glass of water, and set it on the cupboard.

"Now I see it is Sunday," said the husband. He kissed his pretty little wife, and they sat down and read a psalm, holding hands, while the morning sun shone brightly through the window on the fresh roses and the young couple.

"I'm so tired of looking at this!" said the mother of the sparrows as she looked down into the room; and then she flew away.

She did the same thing the following Sunday, for every Sunday fresh roses were placed in the glass, but the rose tree still blossomed just as much. The young sparrows, who now had feathers of their own, wanted to fly with their mother. But she said, "You stay!" And so they stayed.

She flew off; but, whatever the reason, she suddenly was caught in a horsehair net that some boys had fastened to a bough! The horsehair bound about her leg so tightly she thought it was cut in half. How it pained and terrified her! The boys sprang forward and seized the bird with a cruelly hard grasp.

"It's nothing but a sparrow!" they said, but they wouldn't let her go. They took her home, and every time she cried they hit her on the beak.

In the farmhouse there was an old man who knew how to make soap for shaving and washing hands, soap in balls and pieces. He was a wandering, merry old fellow. When he saw the sparrow that the boys brought, and which they said they didn't care about, he said to them, "Shall we make it beautiful?"

The sparrow mother shivered with fear as he said this. Out of his box of the brightest colors he took a lot of shining gold leaf; then he sent the boys for an egg, smeared its white all over the sparrow, and laid the gold upon it.