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Updated: June 12, 2025
The surf, dashing in under her fantail, had more power than McGuffey's engines, and, foot by foot, the Maggie proceeded to dig herself in. Mr. Gibney listened for five minutes to the uproar that rose from the bowels of the little steamer before he whistled up Mr. McGuffey. "Kill her, kill her," he ordered. "Your wheel will bite into the sand first thing you know, and tear the stern off her.
This supervisor of the proceedings, asserting his employers' rights to cart off by daylight, nightlight, torchlight, when they would, must have been the death of Silas if the work had lasted much longer. Seeming never to need sleep himself, he would reappear, with a tied-up broken head, in fantail hat and velveteen smalls, like an accursed goblin, at the most unholy and untimely hours.
Wallace says of these developments: "Variation seems to have reached its limits in these birds. But so it has in nature. The fantail has not only more tail-feathers than any of the three hundred and forty existing species of pigeons, but more than any of the eight thousand known species of birds.
Again, the wild rock pigeon seems to be the ancestral form from which the fantail and pouter and carrier-pigeon with their diverse characters have taken their origin. It is true that some biologists have urged certain technical objections to the employment of domesticated animals and their history as analogies to the processes and results in wild nature.
He is about the size of a fantail pigeon, his colour a bright orange and his wings and tail appear as though fringed; his head is ornamented with a superb double-feathery crest edged with purple. He passes the day amid gloomy damps and silence, and only issues out for food a short time at sunrise and sunset. He is of the gallinaceous tribe.
Two fantail pigeons of purest white, sitting in a dark yew tree that overhangs the stream a hundred yards away, make the prettiest picture in the world against the dusky foliage. Splash! a great brown trout rolls in the shallow water like a porpoise in the sea. A two-pounder in this little stream makes as much fuss as a twenty-pound salmon in the mighty Tweed.
An argument, as it seems to me, of great weight, and applicable in several other cases, is, that the above-specified breeds, though agreeing generally in constitution, habits, voice, colouring, and in most parts of their structure, with the wild rock-pigeon, yet are certainly highly abnormal in other parts of their structure; we may look in vain throughout the whole great family of Columbidæ for a beak like that of the English carrier, or that of the short-faced tumbler, or barb; for reversed feathers like those of the Jacobin; for a crop like that of the pouter; for tail-feathers like those of the fantail.
In crossing the breeds between the Fantail and the Pouter, the Carrier and the Tumbler, or any other variety or race you may name so far as we know at present there is no difficulty in breeding together the mongrels.
"No," said Soames, "why should my sister be incommoded by his choosing to go..." "To Jericho!" said Dreamer, again coming round his corner; "quite so. People oughtn't to go to Jericho, ought they, Mrs. Dartie?" And he raised his gown into a sort of fantail. "I agree. We can go forward. Is there anything more?" "Nothing at present," said Soames meaningly; "I wanted you to see my sister."
Moreover, I do not believe that any ornithologist would place the English carrier, the short-faced tumbler, the runt, the barb, pouter, and fantail, in the same genus; more especially as in each of these breeds several truly-inherited sub-breeds, or species, as he might have called them, could be shown him."
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