My mother said that a cruel childhood was often a training school for the gallows, and the boy who killed defenseless birds and bugs deadened his sensibilities and destroyed his moral nature so that it was easy to commit greater crimes.
So dreadful became the persecutions of the schoolboys that the indigo birds finally held a council and determined to leave that part of the country and settle far from the habitations of men, where they might live unmolested and free from persecutions..