eful ears moving this way and that, now thrown
forwards, now backwards, now erected, to catch the slightest
sound,--what a picture of fairy grace it is! There is beauty, too, in
the soft, full liquid eye of these animals,--the "bright, black eye" of
the "dear gazelle," which in the East is the very ideal of female
loveliness. Its melting gaze seems full of tenderness, so that we cannot
look without loving it.

Nor is beauty of colour wholly wanting. How rich is the tawny fur of the
tiger, dashed with its black streaks! And the brighter yellow of the
leopard and the jaguar, studded all over with rosettes of black spots!
We forget the ferocity of the savage in its beautifully-painted coat.
The zebra, too,--with the fine contrast of those bands of richest sable
on the cream-coloured ground, now bold and broad, as on the rounded
body, now running in fine parallel but irregularly-waved lines, as on
the face,--is a beautiful quadruped; and a herd of them galloping
wantonly over a South African plain, must be a sight worth seeing
indeed.

When we come to Birds, however, beauty is not the exception, but the
rule. The form of a bird is almost always graceful; the rounded
swellings and undulations of outline, and the smoothness of the plumage
give pleasure to the eye, even when there is no attractiveness of hue.
One has almost a difficulty in naming an inelegant bird. But when, as in
a thousand instances, brilliancy of colouring is combined with elegance
of shape and smoothness of plumage, we must be charmed. Is not our own
little goldfinch, is not the pert chaffinch that comes up to our very
feet for a grain or a crumb, a pretty object? But the tropical
birds,--we must look at them if we wish to know what nature can do in
the way of adornment. We should go to the flats on the embouchure of the
Amazon, and see the rosy spoonbills, in their delicate carnation dress,
set off by the lustrous crimson of their shoulders and breast-tufts,
feeding by hundreds on the green mud, or watch the gorgeous ibises, all
clad in glowing scarlet with black-tipped wings, when, in serried ranks,
a mile in length, like the vermillion cloud of morning, they come to
their breeding-place,--a truly magnificent sight.[204]

The first of the Parrot tribe that I ever had an opportunity of seeing
in its native freedom was the beautiful Parrakeet of the Southern
States. Eighty or a hundred birds in one compact flock passed me flying
low, and all nearly on t