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fruits, which it found where desert touched oasis, mountain, and fertile plain. It swallowed large, hard pieces of food, and then, as small birds used tiny pebbles in masceration, these big birds picked up large ones. the young birds would be of tender flesh, I can see no reason why they should not have been eaten as well as the eggs; and no doubt they were, by desert tribes.

They are of the birds which have been considered among the prerogatives of royalty, as history tells us that the cruel and wicked Roman emperor Elagabalus had ostrich brains served at feasts A.D. 204. This appears quite as bad as dishes of larks' tongues and pea-fowl brains, upon which these awful men loved to feast. Surely the world is growing infinitely better. Even an emperor who did such things now would not be safe from the sentiment of the people.

The beautiful feathers of the birds have been used as decorations for royalty, female hat and hair ornaments, male lodge paraphernalia, and as an emblem of royalty. Three white ostrich plumes are the badge of the Prince of Wales to-day. So wonderful are ostrich feathers, and so prized, that enough of them could not be secured from the wild birds of Asia, Africa, and a slightly different species in South America; so men have gone into the business of importing, taming, and breeding these birds in suitable locations.

With us they thrive in the climate of California, Arizona, or Florida, and a number of farms have been established on which many birds are raised, and are very profitable. One male is given two females and several acres of ground, for the birds must have range to be healthy. The eggs are laid upon the earth and brooded over more in our colder climate than in their native home. Some breeders use incubators. The Cawston Ostrich Farm, of Pasadena, allows the females to make their nests and raise their young under as nearly natural conditions as possible.

The feathers are exquisite on captive birds, as they can be carefully tended, allowed to grow full size, and picked at perfection. Of course, they are judiciously selected, trimmed, curled, and coloured before being marketed.

Imported birds at feather-producing age are valued at five hundred dollars each. Their plumes can be plucked more frequently than you would think, and while single feathers average about seven dollars each, long ones are fastened together in great fluffy, delicately coloured plumes over a yard in length, of many spines thickness, of every delicate tint of the rainbow, and selling from forty to a hundred dollars.

But I wish I had just one fine, long single feather dropped naturally by a bird as it crosses the hills of Edom in changing feeding grounds from Arabia to Syria; or along the foothills of the Lebanon range where it meets the desert. Then that plume would symbolize to me not only all the great and noble bird means, not all a thing of beauty represents, but it would be the key to a vision in which I would see the tawny hot sands of the glowing Eastern desert, the purple skies, the shimmering palmshaded pools of water, the wilderness like unto that in which John cried out, and the long line of swaying camels starting across the trackless sands, perhaps on the way to Babylon.

CHAPTER IX

THE COCK AND HEN

"How often would I have gathered thy children together, Even as a hen gathereth her own brood under her wings, And ye would not!"

-LUKE.

SEVERAL of the disciples quoted Him, but Jesus Himself was responsible for the only direct mention of what we call "domestic fowl," in the Bible. It was the constant practice of the Great Teacher to draw comparisons and similes from objects in sight of His hearers, and much of the striking force of His work is due to this ability to point a moral from simply homely things, so that all hearers received the full force of the illustrations. He was never seeking after oratorical effects, and never trying to prove how much He knew. On the contrary, it seemed to be a continual purpose to point out to His followers the commonest things of life, and surprise them with how much they knew that they had not realized.

If you watch an audience which a speaker is trying to daze with his mental attainments, you may see mouths slightly agape; but you will see cold, hard faces. But if the talker has the wit to "point his moral, and adorn his tale" with illustrations his audience recognizes, you will observe heads nodding approval, and smiling faces aglow with working brains. This was always the method of Jesus. He noted every simple, common thing along the way, and when He came to speak, the parable of the mustard-seed, the sower, and the net that was cast into the sea went straight to the heart of every hearer. When He made comparisons, the house on the sand, the foolish virgins, and the brooding hen served as nothing else could to convince followers of the points He strove to make. His simple, forceful, plain speech made David, Isaiah, and Solomon seem just a trifle grandiloquent in comparison.

When you read His sayings you are in home country. You can lay aside your commentary, He explains Himself.

One of the most frequently quoted expressions of Jesus was suggested by a common, brooding hen. Darwin said the red jungle fowl of India was the parent stock of the domestic races.' It was found in the Philippines, India, China, and Malay Peninsula. In plumage it most resembled the black-breasted game fowl of to-day. Its native home was in great forests, deep jungles, and thickets; and where cultivation crept near those places it came out in small parties to the fields, and searched for food. Hunters in these forests observed in it the inclination to wake the day and sound the night bugle, just as do its descendants. Its voice was described in tone as exactly that of a bantam, but its crow was short, shrill, and of peculiar strained effect, as if the utterance hurt the throat of the bird. No doubt those fowl would have been frightened half to death to have heard the good full-throated roar of their Shanghai, Bramah, or Cochin-China descendants drawn out with full artistic effect. If there was nothing else to indicate the homes in which our breeds originated, those names would serve.

Wild hens nested in the grass, deposited from ten to twelve white eggs, and brooded when they finished laying, so that all the young arrived at the same time. This habit of the wild fowl, partridges, and quail is the basis of our custom of saving eggs and setting a hen on a nestful. It is nature's way, and is best, in a natural state at least.

There is a grey jungle fowl in India that has even more of a peculiar broken crow; another species in Java, and the Cingalese jungle fowl of Ceylon is also of unusual voice. All of these will breed in captivity with domestic fowl, but their young are always sterile hybrids. Nature seems to keep each family direct in this way, and yet it would seem that in the origin of species crossing was responsible for new forms. But there is a law that perhaps we have not yet learned fully.

I have been watching the efforts of Bob Burdette Black, a man greatly interested in nature study, to cross the golden pheasant with the common bantam in the hope

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of domesticating a beautiful bird resembling a pheasant on his premises. In his first attempt he placed the pheasant-bantam egg in a common nest, and all of them spoiled. Then he bethought him that the pheasant brooded on the ground, and on the next trial he placed the eggs on earth. A large per cent. hatched, and he used his usual methods with young chicks; but they all died. After repeated attempts he found a little brown bantam hen one morning with three young, and in disgust he turned them out to shift for themselves. They took to grass as ducks take to water, and all three lived, and grew finely, proving that something besides a cat was killed with care.

One of these chicks was the dark mother-colour, two were beautiful gold with dark tail bands, wing and throat mottlings. All had pheasant legs, shape of body, and head. None had the red wattles, or the gay neck plumage. All had tails standing straight back instead of erect, and decorated with the long feathers of the pheasant. Their sex could not be determined without killing them, but the tails seemed to indicate that they were nearest male birds. The dark one, which Mr. Black thought most likely to be a hen, strayed, and gave no clue to her habits. She wandered far over the premises, and along the river. Once she frightened me by slipping like a snake through deep grasses, where I lay hiding with a set camera. She came weaving toward me exactly as a monstrous snake, and that slender, dark head and neck shot into my view. One day Mr. Black found her food-hunting in perfect felicity with a flock of quail.

The golden birds which he thought nearest males were much more domestic. They stayed with the chickens, and came regularly to food and water, and the enclosure of the park at night. They might have wandered through the surrounding wheat fields, meadows, and orchards as widely as their dark relative, had they chosen. When spring came they refused to mate, either with bantams or pheasants, and showed no signs of egg-laying, so we concluded they were hybrids. Then, to our amazement, one of the supposed males, the biggest, brightest one, having the longest tail, showed a disposition to brood.