On this particular day, the queen of the market was a black-capped warbler, an artist-bird of great value, set apart in the display from the other birds, like a peerless jewel. She fluttered, _svelte_ and charming all in her was grace. Accustomed to captivity by a long training, she seemed to regret nothing, and could only communicate to the soul happy and gentle impressions. She was plainly a being of perfect geniality, and of such harmony of song and movement, that in seeing her move I thought I heard her sing.
Lower, very much lower, in a narrow cage, a bird somewhat larger in size, very inhumanly confined, gave me a curious and quite opposite impression. This was a chaffinch, and the first which I had seen blind. No spectacle could be more painful. The man who would purchase by such a deed of cruelty this victim's song, must have a nature alien to all harmony, a barbarous soul. His attitude of labour and torture rendered his song very painful to me. The worst of it is that it was human; it reminded one of the turns of the head and the ungracious motions of the shoulders which short-sighted persons, or men become blind, indulge in. Such is never the case with those born blind. With a violent but continual effort, grown habitual, the head inclined to the right, with empty eyes he sought the light. The neck was outstretched, to sink again between the shoulders, and swelled out to gain new strength--the neck short, the shoulders bent. This unhappy virtuoso, whose song, like himself, was dissembled and deformed, had been a mean image of the ugliness of the slave-artist, if not ennobled by that indomitable effort to pursue the light, seeking it always on high, and ever centering his song in the invisible sun which he had treasured up in his soul.
Moderately capable of profiting by instruction, this bird repeats, with a marvellous metallic _timbre_, the song of his native wood, and preserves the particular accent of the country in which he was born; there being as many dialects of chaffinches as there are different districts. He remains faithful to his own; he sings only his cradle-song, and that with an uniform rate, but with a wild passion and an extraordinary emulation. Set opposite a rival, he will repeat it eight hundred successive times; occasionally he dies of it. I am not astonished that the Belgians enthusiastically celebrate the combats of this hero of the national song, the chorister of their forest of Ardennes, decreeing prizes, crowns, even triumphal arches, to those acts of supreme devotion in which life is yielded for victory.