gray, and covered with white birds--geese and gulls of many
different sorts. This is a copy of a bit of a famous rock off the coast
of Scotland called the Bass Rock, which rises out of the sea like an
enormous stone many hundreds of feet high. At the times of the year when
birds make their nests it is white with wild sea-birds, and the nests
are laid along the crevices and shelves of the bare rock, so near
together that the birds can easily touch one another while they are
sitting on them. If anyone fired a gun near the rock there would be a
sudden flight up into the air of hundreds of birds all at once, like a
gigantic cloud, flying, whirling, screaming, mixed up together, rising
higher and higher in great circles till you would feel stunned and
deafened and almost frightened, as if a piece of the sky had suddenly
taken shape and broken up over your head. These wild birds know they are
safe on the Bass Rock, and they take no care to protect their nests; no
one could climb up those sheer precipices and steal the eggs. The birds
sit there safely, looking down upon such heights as would make you
giddy even to see; and in front the blue sea stretches for miles. It is
a wild, free life.

Going back down the room, there may be time to notice the cases on the
sides of the partitions full of stuffed birds, many very beautiful, but
not so interesting as those that are shown with their nests and young
ones. Quite near the door is a case with some large birds as tall as a
child of seven in it. They are cassowaries, with drooping dark-brown
feathers that look rather out of curl, and necks of crimson and blue.
Further on there is a family of ostriches, the great father bird very
grand and with a black coat, and magnificent white tail-feathers--those
feathers that ladies buy for their hats, and for which they give so much
money. Ostriches are kept on farms in South Africa, and their
tail-feathers are pulled out at certain seasons of the year; and then
they grow, again and are soon ready to be pulled out again, and people
make much money this way. I do not know how much pain this gives the
ostrich, but it cannot be pleasant; and perhaps he wishes sometimes he
was not quite so grand, but was dressed in a plain dull-brown suit
trimmed with dirty white like his humble wife. The ostrich is very
savage, and can never be depended on; he may turn upon the keeper who
has fed him and cared for him for years, and, seizing him, kick him with
hi