A Little Boy Lost

"[short story] "Marta Riquelme", a fantasy, is based on a Legend in which those who suffer too deeply in their lives experience a Transformation, becoming Birds. A Little Boy Lost (1905), apparently written some years earlier, invokes a similar structure of longing: a young boy in California, who may have been fathered by a bird, leaves home and is succoured by the Lady of the Hills; but she cannot keep him either, and he takes ship to a mythical England." (underscore represents linked cross-reference) --SFE: Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), biographical entry by John Clute