and peacocks are alike in taste.

Then peacocks have been made useful in a medicinal way. The doctors once
prescribed peacock broth for pleurisy, peacocks' tongues for epilepsy,
peacocks' fat for colic, peacocks' galls for weak eyes, peahens' eggs
for gout.

It is always darkest just before dawn, and only a week from that
humiliating Sunday episode I was called by my gardener to look at the
dearest little brown something that was darting about in the poultry
yard. It was a baby peacock, only one day old. He got out of the nest in
some way, and preferred to take care of himself. How independent, how
captivating he was! As not one other egg had hatched, he was lamentably,
desperately alone, with dangers on every side, "homeless and
orphanless." Something on that Sabbath morning recalled Melchizedec, the
priest without father or mother, of royal descent, and of great length
of days. Earnestly hoping for longevity for this feathered mite of
princely birth, I called him "Melchizedec."

I caught him and was in his toils. He was a tiny tyrant; I was but a
slave, an attendant, a nurse, a night-watcher. Completely under his
claw!

No more work, no more leisure, no more music or tennis; my life career,
my sphere, was definitely settled. I was Kizzie's attendant--nothing
more. People have cared for rather odd pets, as the leeches tamed and
trained by Lord Erskine; others have been deeply interested in toads,
crickets, mice, lizards, alligators, tortoises, and monkeys. Wolsey was
on familiar terms with a venerable carp; Clive owned a pet tortoise; Sir
John Lubbock contrived to win the affections of a Syrian wasp; Charles
Dudley Warner devoted an entire article in the Atlantic Monthly to the
praises of his cat Calvin; but did you ever hear of a peacock as a
household pet?

As it is the correct thing now to lie down all of a summer afternoon,
hidden by trees, and closely watch every movement of a pair of little
birds, or spend hours by a frog pond studying the sluggish life there,
and as mothers are urged by scientific students to record daily the
development of their infants in each apparently unimportant matter, I
think I may be excused for a brief sketch of my charge, for no mother
ever had a child so precocious, so wise, so willful, so affectionate, so
persistent, as Kizzie <i>at the same age</i>. Before he was three days old,
he would follow me like a dog up and down stairs and all over the house,
walk behind me as I strol