least unpleasant-looking of the lot
is the little Angola vulture, who is put among the kites; and she is bad
enough: a horrible eighteenth-century painted and powdered old woman; a
Pompadour of ninety. The large bearded vulture is not only an
uncompanionable fellow to look at, but he doesn't behave respectably. It
is not respectable to hurl yourself bodily against anybody looking over
a precipice and unaware of your presence, so as to break him up on the
rocks below, and dine off his prime cuts. I have no doubt that
Self--(Self, by-the-bye, keeps eagles and vultures as well as
camels)--has any amount of sympathy for his charges, but who _could_
make a pet of a turkey-vulture, with its nasty, raw-looking red head, or
of a cinereous vulture, with its unwholesome eyes and its
unclean-looking blue wattle? No, I am not over-fond of a vulture. He is
always a dissipated-looking ruffian, of boiled eye and blotchy
complexion, and you know as you look at him that he would prefer to see
you dead rather than alive, so that he might safely take your eyes by
way of an appetizer, and forthwith proceed to lift away your softer
pieces preparatory to strolling under your ribs like a jackdaw in a cage
much too small. He sits there placid, unwinsome, and patient; waiting
for you to die. But he has his little vanities. He is tremendously
proud of his wings--and they certainly are wings to astonish. On a warm
day he likes to open them for coolness, but often he makes this a mere
excuse for showing off. He waits till some easily-impressed visitor
comes along--not a regular frequenter. Then he stands up and spreads his
great pinions abroad, and perhaps turns about, and the visitor is duly
impressed. So the vulture stands and receives the admiration, hoping the
while that the visitor has heart disease, and will drop dead where he
stands. And when the visitor walks off without dying the old harpy lets
his wings fall open, ready for somebody else.

[Illustration]

_The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes._

XIX.--THE ADVENTURE OF THE REIGATE SQUIRE.

BY A. CONAN DOYLE.

It was some time before the health of my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,
recovered from the strain caused by his immense exertions in the spring
of '87. The whole question of the Netherland-Sumatra Company and of the
colossal schemes of Baron Maupertins are too recent in the minds of the
public, and are too intimately concerned with politics and finance, to
be fitting subjec