Letter LXXII

The other thing came out of a less personal greed, and was years later:
Arthur and I were collecting eggs, and in the loft over one of the
out-houses there was a swallow's nest too high up to be reached by any
ladder we could get up there. I was intent on getting the eggs, and
thought of no other thing that might chance: so I spread a soft fall
below, and with a long pole I broke the floor of the nest. Then with a
sudden stir of horror I saw soft things falling along with the clay,
tiny and feathery. Two were killed by the breakage that fell with them,
but one was quite alive and unhurt. I gathered up the remnants of the
nest and set it with the young one in it by the loft window where the
parent-birds might see, making clumsy strivings of pity to quiet my
conscience. The parent-birds did see, soon enough: they returned, first
up to the rafters, then darting round and round and crying; then to
where their little one lay helpless and exposed, hung over it with a
nibbling movement of their beaks for a moment, making my miserable heart
bound up with hope: then away, away, shrieking into the July sunshine.
Once they came back, and shrieked at the horror of it all, and fled away
not to return.

I remained for hours and did whatever silly pity could dictate: but of
course the young one died: and I--cleared away all remains that nobody
might see! And that I gave up egg-collecting after that was no penance,
but choice. Since then the poignancy of my regret when I think of it has
never softened. The question which pride of life and love of make-believe
till then had not raised in me, "Am I a god to kill and to make alive?"
was answered all at once by an emphatic "No," which I never afterward
forgot. But the grief remained all the same, that life, to teach me that
blunt truth, should have had to make sacrifice in the mote-hung loft of
three frail lives on a clay-altar, and bring to nothing but pain and a
last miserable dart away into the bright sunshine the spring work of two
swift-winged intelligences. Is man, we are told to think, not worth many
sparrows? Oh, Beloved, sometimes I doubt it! and would in thought give my
life that those swallows in their generations might live again.