and grain, or tender herbs. Force, vanity, aggression, and greediness pertain to the one class; grace, agility, sentiment, devotion, and temperance to the other. The gallinaceous birds seem to be representatives of the fervid and selfish passions of the East; the Doves to have been created as types almost of Christian virtue. To suffer the onslaughts of the cruel; to bear, and, if possible, to escape, but neither to attack nor to revenge; to adhere to chastity, even when gratifying their natural affections; to submit to an equal division of the labour of tending the helpless young; to prefer a settled home to indulgence in capricious wanderings -these are a few out of the many attributes which have conciliated towards them the approving regard of mankind, and even perhaps caused them to be honoured by being mysteriously connected with some of the most meaning ceremonies and important events that are mentioned in sacred history.

And yet, at the present day, a love for Pigeons is considered rather low, a taste scarcely the thing to be indulged in, a study of a department of nature from which little can be learned, and, as a hobby, decidedly out of fashion. But any pursuit may be vulgarized and made the means of evil, by being taken up from base motives and in an unworthy manner; and, on the other hand, even an indulgence in the Pigeon fancy may be so regulated and conducted as to afford interest and instruction to the young, and a healthy relaxation and matter for speculative inquiry to their seniors.

What boy, whose parents permitted him to keep ever so few pairs of Pigeons, forgets in after days the pleasing anxieties of which they were the source-the occupation for spare half-hours which they never failed

CHAP. I.

BOY PIGEON-KEEPERS.

to afford? Well do we remember our first two pigeonhouses, of widely-diverse construction; the earliest effort of contrivance being an old tea-chest fixed against a wall, with the complicated machinery of a falling platform, or "trap," in front, to be drawn up by a halfpenny-worth of string, so as to secure the inmates, or their visitors, for a learned inspection; the second, a more ambitious piece of architecture, namely, a tub mounted on the top of a short scaffold-pole, divided internally into apartments, each of some cubic inches capacity, and each with a little landing-place projecting for the birds to alight upon, after their meal on the ground, or their circling exercise above the housetops. And the wonderment to behold the process of fixing this lofty structure firm and upright in its site in the back-yard! How the man dug an awful hole in the ground, from which he could with difficulty shovel out the earth for the crowding, and the pushing, and the peeping in of us children and the maids-how the tall structure was, by the combined efforts of all present, slowly set upright-how three or four vast flintstones (rocks they seemed to us to be) were jammed in at the foot with a beetle borrowed from the paviour that lived up a yard in our street-how, when earth and pebbles had been duly added to make all smooth and tight, we retired a few yards and looked up with admiration—and when at last the short ladder was brought wherewith to ascend, which we did without delay, and inspect the lockers, Smeaton, gazing from the top of the Eddystone Lighthouse, or Stephenson darting on a locomotive engine through the Menai Tube, might enjoy a pride higher in degree, but not stronger in intenseness!

66

And then, the strange events necessarily occurring to us. (The plural is used because no boy pigeon-keeper looks after his birds without a companion or two.) The severe countenance with which our neighbour and landlord, hitherto beaming with benignant smiles, now greeted us as we were walking over the tiles of the outhouses in pursuit of an old Duffer" with a clipped wing; the astonishment of a respectable shoemaker on the other side of the street, to see a boy's face peeping over the ridge of the opposite roof, with the air of Cortes surveying the Pacific Ocean from the summit of the Andes, rather than with the consciousness of being the mischievous urchin that he was; the arrival of a strange Pigeon with a sore and naked breast; the bold resolve to use decisive surgery, and to decapitate it, lest the evil should prove contagious; the trepidation of the maid who held the body, while we secured the head and wielded the fatal chopper; the universal horror that the body should flap, and flutter, and palpitate for a while after the operation was complete; the enigmatical illustration from English history, "King Charles walked and talked; half an hour after, his head was off," uttered without proper pause at the semicolon or comma-these, and a whole chronicle full of such-like accidents, soon showed us that life, to the young, is an onward journey through an unexplored country, every step in which leads to some discovery, and opens to us a pleasant or a repulsive prospect. In maturer age, pitfalls, famishing deserts, and entangled wildernesses, or the flattering and deceptive mirage, showing signs of refreshing waters where drought alone exists, may await our advancing footsteps; or it may be our better fate to progress

CHAP. I.]

PARADOXICAL INCREASE.

through glorious scenes, and mount to commanding eminences, still excited in either case by fresh and new adventure. Progressive must our journey ever continue to be. Nor even in old age need our interest in the novelties of existence flag, if we have but duties and proper pursuits in this world, and a religious hope for the next.

But Pigeons are useful, not as mere pets for childhood and diversions for men, but as affording, by their extraordinary and most paradoxical increase, a valuable supply of food both to man and to other carnivorous creatures. It seems strange that a creature which brings two at most at a birth, so to speak, should multiply rapidly into countless flocks; and that the species which is of all the most innumerable, darkening the sky from one point of the horizon to the opposite visible verge, and stretching its living streams no one knows how many miles beyond it each way-small detachments from whose main army supply some of the American cities with poultry by cart-loads, till the inhabitants almost loathe the sight of the dish, good as it is, upon their tables-should yet lay no more than two, and frequently only a single egg, and still more frequently rear but a single chick*, while

'My friend Dr. Bachman says, in a note sent to me, 'In the more cultivated parts of the United States, the Passenger Pigeon no longer breeds in communities. I have secured many nests scattered throughout the woods, seldom near each other. They were built close to the stems of thin but tall pine trees (Pinus strobus), and were composed of a few sticks; the eggs invariably two, and white.' There is frequently but one young bird in the nest, probably from the loose manner in which it has been constructed, so that either a young bird or an egg drops out. Indeed, I have found both at the foot of the tree. This is no doubt accidental, and not to be attributed to a habit which the bird may be supposed to have of throw

6

CAPTIVE BIRDS SOMETIMES LESS PROLIFIC. [CHAP. I.

the Partridge, the Turkey, the Guinea-fowl, and even the Hen, notwithstanding the multitudinous broods they lead forth, are not nearly so abundant, the closest approach to them among gallinaceous birds being perhaps made by the Quail. But a due attention to the growth, mode of rearing, and subsequent proceedings, of the young Pigeons go far to explain how so vast and anomalous a result is obtained from means apparently so inadequate, and which thus becomes less puzzling to us than the existence of immense flocks of Sea-fowl, of species which never lay but a single egg, and that only once a year. These, however, are probably much indebted for their numbers to their hardiness and longevity, as well as to their security from serious persecution. The Pigeon, on the contrary, seems to have overspread the land in consequence of an innate force of reproductiveness with which it seems to have been purposely and providentially endowed for the sake of affording a suitable prey to the numerous fleshly appetites on earth and in air, of winged, quadruped, and reptile gluttons which are perpetually craving to be daily satisfied.

All this destiny of supplying meat to the eater would

ing out an egg or one of its young. I have frequently taken two from the same nest, and reared them. A curious change of habits has taken place in England in those Pigeons which I presented to the Earl of Derby in 1830, that nobleman having assured me that ever since they began breeding in his aviaries, they have laid only one egg."-Audubon's Orn. Biog. vol. v. p. 552. A similar decreased number of eggs and young is frequently produced by other birds in captivity, as, for instance, sometimes in the Collared Turtle. A Canary hen, mated with a Linnet, has with me this summer (1849) laid a single egg, the young one from which she has reared with the anxiety and care usually bestowed upon only children. I have heard of other like cases of Canaries producing a solitary egg and young one.