FRIEND OF THE BIRDS.

Matamata Record, Volume XIII, Issue 1141, 24 July 1930, Page 6

FRIEND OF THE BIRDS.

AN OLD MAN OF PARIS. There is a sad note in the songs of the birds in the Tuilleries Gardens in Paris to-day. They miss their daily call—-a soft whistling accompanied by endearing names—which they understood. For years the call had been given by a little, white-haired old man sitting on a bench. The next moment scores of sparrows, blackbirds, and a few pigeons would leave the trees and perch on his head and shoulders, and pick at the bread in his mouth and hands. It was a delightful scene that was thus created by the bird charmer, and it was witnessed daily by frequenters of the gardens. But it is not witnessed to-day (writes the Paris correspondent of the London Daily Telegram), for the bird charmer is not there. He will never come again, for he is dead. No one who saw Louis Henri Julian in the midst of his feathered friends, which he called and fed in all weathers, imagined that the old man, who seemed to be so happy and contented, suffered from an incurable malady. He lived on modest means in a little room on the fourth storey of a house in the Rue Chapon. Early on a reqent morning a policeman heard groaning in the street. The bird charmer had flung himself from his window. He left two notes—one to the prefect of police, informing M. Chiappe that, suffering from an incurable disease, he had decided to die. The other was to his concierge, inviting her to select what articles of linen pleased her dhd to give the rest to a couple whom he named.