Published: Civil and Military Gazette, 4 March 1886.

Attribution: In Scrapbook 3 (28/3, p. 4).

Text: Civil and Military Gazette.

Notes: A lightly corrected galley proof of this article was sent by RK to W. C. Crofts and is now in the Rare Book Division of the Library of Congress (Carpenter Collection). The heading, ostensibly from the medieval legend of Prester John, is RK's imitation, suited to the story he tells.

‘Prisoners and Captives’ was reprinted in the Martindell–Ballard pamphlets and in Harbord, ii, 1098–101.

“I can't get out” quoth the Starling, and Sterne, maudlin sentimentalist that he was, wept.

Fellow Starlings, neither you nor I nor our mates nor our nestlings can get out; and Sterne, who would have immortalized us – had he no liaison on hand – is dead. The bars of our captivity are hard to endure, and the Black Water which divides us from the pleasant hedgerows, whence we came, broad and impassable. We are the “sillie fowle” of Prester John's country, who have flown eastward with a light heart, and find, all too late, that there is no return.

How does it come about? Who knows? or knowing, who would care to say? It may be we were froward Starlings in our youth – bold bad birds shipped eastward by wearied relatives in the fervent hope that we might never come back. It may be that we are weighed down by the claims of our own kind – that callow nestlings or old birds, flit merrily over the home pastures at our expense; and that we must catch the early worm for several beaks beside our own. It may be that you or I are tied and bound by the chain of our own sins to these shores in a hundred thousand different ways. What is the good of curiosity? It is enough that we came here many, many years since; that we are always “going home” and we never go.