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Tropic birds, the bo's'ns of the sailor, their bodies whitish gray, with their two long tail-feathers, had their haunt there, and piped above the trees. The river was a fierce torrent, and leaped into a water-hewn lava basin, where it swirled and foamed before it rushed, singing, through a stone funnel to the border of the chasm, and sprang with a dull roar into the ether.
It floated freely upon the breeze; which the filmy mist, though half disclosing, could not altogether conceal. The deep red colour was too scarce upon the ocean to be mistaken for the livery of any of its denizens. It could not be the tail-feathers of the tropic bird so prized by the chiefs of Polynesia; nor yet the scarlet pouch of the sea-hawk. It could be nothing else than a "bit o' buntin'."
Then there is the emu-wren, all sad-coloured, but quaint, with the tail-feathers sticking up on end, and exactly like those of an emu; on the very smallest scale, even to the peculiarity of two feathers growing out of the same little quill.
It is ever making itself an obtuse triangle before the god of its idolatry its knees and nose on the earth, its tail-feathers in the air; but we had yet to learn that it considered "that divinity which doth behedge a king" capable of sanctifying a woman's shame, transforming a foul leman into an angel of light!
The changes of plumage in the Cuckoo, however, appear to be rather irregular, as I have one killed in June nearly in the normal plumage, but with many of the old feathers left, which have a very Kestrel-like appearance, being redder than the ordinary plumage of the young bird; some of the tail-feathers, however, have more the appearance of the ordinary tail-feathers of the young Cuckoo soon after the tail has reached its full growth: the moult in this bird must have been very irregular, as it was not completed in June, when, as a rule, it would have been in full plumage, unless, as may possibly be the case, this bird was the produce of a second laying during the southern migration, and consequently, instead of a year, be only about six months old.
The most noteworthy of these races are, the four great stocks known to the "fancy" as tumblers, pouters, carriers, and fantails; birds which not only differ most singularly in size, colour, and habits, but in the form of the beak and of the skull; in the proportions of the beak to the skull; in the number of tail-feathers; in the absolute and relative size of the feet; in the presence or absence of the uropygial gland; in the number of vertebrae in the back; in short, in precisely those characters in which the genera and species of birds differ from one another.
"Good job, too," said the thrush; "I wish mine was a cocktail, and then I shouldn't have had these nobs of clay sticking to it;" saying which he showed his neighbour three or four little clay-pellets attached to his tail-feathers, evidently caught up when fetching his mortar from the pond side.
When the wind slightly stirs the surface and these dancing ripples catch the sunbeams, one by one, in changeful and irregular measure, the eyes are dazzled with iridescences and living color-changes covering hundreds of acres, thousands of them, as exquisite, glorious and dazzling as revealed in the most perfect peacock's tail-feathers, or humming-bird's throat.
With this thought in mind, it may be interesting to compare the two projections, one on each side of the three tail-feathers of this figure, with the extremity of the body of a bird shown in plate CXLI, e.
"All I 'll hab to do is jes' crawl into my grave en stay dere. I done raised 'im fum de egg up, en now he 's got comb en kin crow it 's tail-feathers over de fence en fly off wid 'im! Ah, Lawd! You done made 'em en You knows whut roosters is like!" "Emma! Look here, confound it! "Who gwine look after 'im? I axes you fum my heart, who gwine do it?
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