ke upon the door, but gave telling blows
directly upon the wire. A rubber band was looped about a rod for him to
play with, in the expectation that he would pull on it and make sport;
but he disappointed us all by hammering at the loop, until he loosened
it and easily pulled it off. Again it was tied on with strong linen
thread; he turned his whole attention to the knot of the latter, till it
yielded and was disposed of also.

Dear as was this bird, he was a more than usually troublesome pet. My
desk became his favorite playground, and havoc indeed he made with the
things upon it; snatching and running off with paper, pen, or any small
object, destroying boxes and injuring books. Finally, in self-defense,
I adopted the plan of laying over it every morning a woolen cloth, which
must be lifted every time anything was taken from the desk. This
arrangement did not please my small friend in blue, and he took pains to
express his displeasure in the most emphatic way. He came down upon the
cover, tramped all over it, and sought small holes in it through which
to thrust his bill. One day he was busily engaged in hammering a book
through an opening, and to cure him of the trick I slipped my hand
under, caught his beak between two fingers, and held it a moment. This
amazed but did not alarm the bird; on the contrary, he plainly decided
to persevere till he found out the secret. He pecked the mounds made by
my fingers; he stooped and looked into the hole, and then probed again.
This time I held him longer, so that he had to struggle and beat his
wings to get away, and then he walked off indignantly. Still he was not
satisfied about that mystery, and in a moment he was back again, trying
in new ways to penetrate it. I was tired before he was. He was baffled
only temporarily; he soon learned to draw up the fabric, hold the slack
under one foot while he pulled it still further, and thus soon reach
anything he desired.

The blue-jay always pried into packages by pecking a hole in the
wrapper and examining the contents through that; and boxes he opened by
delivering upward blows under the edge of the cover. The waste-basket he
nearly emptied from the outside by dragging papers through the openings
in the weaving. Seeing two or three unmounted photographs put into a
book, he went speedily for that volume, thrust his beak into the slight
opening made by the pictures, and pulled them out, flying at once across
the room with one in his mo