in the water-pipe; while the squirrels, sticking head downwards to their respective branches, are having a twopenny-half-penny argument across the garden path. Meanwhile, the green parrot is desolating the fruit-tree. Like the Ettrick Shepherd they never can eat a few of anything, and his luncheons are all heavy dinners. “ That frugal bit of the old Britons of the bigness of a bean,” which could satisfy the hunger and thirst of bur ancestors for a whole day, would not suffice the green parrot for one meal, for not only is his appetite inordinate, but his wastefulness also, and what he cannot eat he destroys. He enters a tree of fruit as the Visigoths entered a building. His motto is, “What I cannot take I will not leave,” and he pillages the branches, gutting them of even their unripest fruit. Dr. Jerdon, in his Birds of India, records the fact that “owls attack these birds by night,” and there is, ill-feeling apart, certainly something very comfortable in the knowledge that while we are warm a-bed owls are most probably garrotting the green parrots.
I have spoken elsewhere, with some inadvertence, of “the Republic of Birds;” although by my own showing — for I write of sovereign eagles and knightly falcons — the constitution of the volucrine world is an unlimited monarchy, of which the despotism is onty tempered by the strong social bonds that lend strength to the lower orders of birds. The tyrant kite is powerless before the corvine Vehm-gericht; and it is with hesitation that the hawk offers violence to a sparrows’ club. But there are undoubtedly among the feathered race some to whom a republic would present itself as the more perfect form of government, and to none more certainly than the mynas.[1] The myna is, although a
- ↑ Sturninæ, the Starlings.
