ing. It is not musical but is very comical, and,
somehow, it has a tendency to set everybody laughing who is within sound
of it.

"The bird is about the size of a full-grown pigeon, perhaps a little
larger. He is not handsomely proportioned, his head being too large for
his body and his tail very small. His feathers are white and black, and
he has a comical appearance that harmonizes well with his humorous
manner. He is easily domesticated, and will learn to talk quite as
readily as the parrot does.

"The laughing jackass is a friend of the bushman, as he foretells wet
weather. When the air is dry and clear, he is a very lively bird, and
fills the air with the sound of his laughter; but if rain is coming, or
especially if it has come, he is the very picture of misery and
unhappiness. He mopes on his perch, whether it be in a cage, or on the
limb of a tree, or in the open air, with his feathers ruffled, and a
very bedraggled appearance, like a hen that has been caught in a shower.
In the forest he will imitate the sound of an axe cutting at a tree, and
many a man has been deceived into walking a mile or more in the
expectation of finding somebody at work.

"The bird belongs to the kingfisher family, but does not hunt much for
fishes, his favorite food being snakes. It makes no difference to him
whether the snakes are poisonous or not, as his attacks upon them are
limited only by their size. Large snakes he cannot handle, but small
ones are his delight. He drops down upon them with the quickness of a
flash, seizes them just back of the head, and then flies up in the air a
hundred feet to drop them upon the hardest piece of ground he can find.

"The fall breaks their backs, and he keeps up this performance until
life is extinct, when he devours his prey. His services as a
snake-killer are known all over the country, and consequently he is
never shot or trapped. He is intelligent enough to understand his
immunity from attack, and comes fearlessly about the houses of the
people in the country districts.

"Speaking of snakes reminds me that they have a very good collection in
the Zoo. We asked the keeper to indicate to us the snakes peculiar to
Australia, and he did so. The largest of them is known as the carpet
snake, and the specimen that we saw was about ten feet long. It belongs
to the constrictor family, being perfectly harmless so far as its bite
is concerned, but it has powers of constriction that might be very
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