s great feet until he is stunned, or dance upon him for no reason at
all. He does not look safe; his narrow flat head and cruel eyes would
make you think he was a tyrant. The little ones running about at his
feet look so ridiculously small in comparison that you would hardly
think they could be his children; but in time they, too, will grow big
like papa and have splendid tails, and lord it over their poor wives.

On the other side of the room are birds of paradise, who have also
beautiful tails, but in quite a different style from the ostrich. They
are smallish birds, but their long tails, reddish or yellowish in
colour, fall like cascades or fountains of water on both sides. Ladies
also wear these in their hats sometimes when they want to be very grand.
Near them is one of the birds with the queerest habits of any bird. It
builds a little bower or grotto, and decorates it with shells and
whatever else it can pick up--it really seems to like to make it pretty;
and then it runs about in and out of its bower for amusement. So it is
called the bower bird. These birds live in Australia, and their bowers
are made of bits of strong grass or thin stick woven over to make a
sort of tunnel through which the bird can run. But the funniest thing is
that they like to put bright things, such as shells or pretty stones
about for decoration.

We must now leave the birds, which have taught us so much, and go on to
other galleries. Just across the great hall is a long gallery entirely
filled with the bones and skeletons of animals which are now no longer
found on earth. This does not sound attractive, but it is, almost more
so than the birds we have just left, though, of course, we shall not
find anything pretty here.

Have you ever heard that there was a time when huge animals, larger than
the largest elephant, lived and walked about on earth, not only in hot
countries, but in England, too? If man lived at all in those days he
must have been a poor, frightened, trembling little creature going in
peril of his life from all the monsters who were around him. In England
the river Thames was surrounded by a thick jungle, with mighty trees and
creeping plants, like the jungles in India; and the climate was hot and
steamy like the inside of a greenhouse. Here lived enormous elephants
called mammoths. As we enter the gallery we see one in front of us, a
monstrous creature, who makes the ordinary elephant put behind him to
compare with him s