I was just about to leave when I spotted a cage hanging in the doorway. Like everything else, it was very old, and, in keeping with the general desolation, it should really have been empty, but it wasn’t. A canary was hopping about inside. The little creature’s color, animation, and grace lent a touch of life and youth to the surrounding junk. He was the last surviving passenger from a shipwreck, washed up on that shore, happy and unscathed. As soon as I saw him, he began to jump from perch to perch, as if to say that in the midst of that cemetery there was at least one ray of sunlight. I do not attribute that image to the canary, and I use it only because I am speaking now to rhetorically minded people; as he told me later on, he knew nothing of either cemeteries or sunlight. Carried away by the sheer pleasure he gave me, I felt indignant at his fate and murmured bitterly:

“What base owner could have had the heart to sell him for a few coins? Or what indifferent servant, not wishing to keep this, his late master’s companion, gave him away for free to a small boy, who, in turn, sold him on so that he could buy a lottery ticket?”

The canary paused on the perch and trilled:

“Whoever you are, you’re clearly not in your right mind. I had no owner, nor was I given to a child who then sold me on. Those are the imaginings of a sick mind; go cure yourself, my friend—”

“What?” I asked, interrupting him, without even having time to feel amazed. “So your owner didn’t sell you to this shop? And it wasn’t poverty or idleness that brought you to light up this cemetery like a ray of sunlight?”

“I don’t know what ‘sunlight’ or ‘cemetery’ mean. If the other canaries you’ve known used the first of those words, so much the better, because it’s a lovely word, but I think you’re wrong.”

“Excuse me, are you saying you came here of your own accord, without anyone’s help, unless, of course, that man sitting over there is your owner?”

“My owner? That man is my servant, he gives me food and water every day and with such regularity that if I had to pay him for his services, it would cost me a pretty penny, but canaries don’t pay their servants. Indeed, since the world belongs to canaries, it would be ridiculous for us to pay for something that already exists in that world.”