Article May 21, 1904 Issue

Out of Dreamland

CAROLINE E. LINNELL.

Once, long ago, in the Land of Dreams, there was a barren valley where the dense fog had spread its impenetrable blanket so thickly that the blue sky was never seen; the sun never shone into its gloomy depths; the fresh breeze never blew across its sunken wastes. Nothing grew in this valley except fungi and brambles, nothing lived there except a flock of little birds.

It was the strangest thing that these little birds should be living in this forbidding region, for they were song birds, and their native place was in the upper air, in the glory of the sunlight, and how they came to be there no one knew. Another strange thing was that although they had strong and beautiful wings, they never spread them to fly, they did not know what it was to fly, but went hopping about as best they could, and tearing their plumage on the brambles, and often quarrelling and fighting over the few berries they found to eat. They knew not that their heritage was freedom and their home the upper air. They were song birds, but no one of them had ever sung. They did not even know what it was to sing. They had never seen the sun, whose clear shining wakes the song, and although their feathers were beautiful, they were tarnished and dulled by the dust and damp of the fog land.

They had lived in this valley so long that many of them had no desire for anything different, no thought for aught but the brambles, the stones, and the mist; but others were stirred by an instinct for something better and they groped about blindly, some of them climbing a little way up the rocks. One day a little fellow who had climbed higher than the rest, in his desire to go still higher, began to spring up and lift his wings, and so he found that he could leave the earth and rise in the air. Instinctively he spread his wings and began to fly. Up and up he went into the glory of the morning, and as the sunlight bathed his plumage, turning it to gold and sapphire and ruby, a gush of melody burst forth.

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