92 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



with yellow gold and burnished red, copper and 

 brightest russet leaves. He is one with it all, a part 

 of that splendour, and a beautifully decorative 

 figure as he moves slowly with deliberate jetting 

 gait, or stands at attention, the eared head and shin- 

 ing neck raised and one foot lifted. Many a writer has 

 tried to paint him in words; perhaps Ruskin alone 

 succeeds, in a passage which was intended to be des- 

 criptive of the colouring of the pheasants generally. 



Their plumage [he said] is for the most part warm brown, 

 delicately and even beautifully spotty; and in the goodliest 

 species the spots become variegated, or inlaid as in a Byzantine 

 pavement, deepening into imperial purple and azure, and lighting 

 into lustre of innumerable eyes. 



But alas! not infrequently when I have seen the 

 pheasant in that way in the coloured woods in 

 October, when after the annual moult his own 

 colouring is richest and he is seen at his best, my 

 delight has vanished when I have lifted my eyes to 

 look through the thinned foliage at the distant 

 prospect of earth and the blue overarching sky. For 

 who that has ever looked at nature in other regions, 

 where this perpetual hideous war of extermination 

 against all noble feathered life is not carried on, does 

 not miss the great soaring bird in the scene — eagle, 

 or vulture, or buzzard, or kite, or harrier — floating 

 at ease on broad vans, or rising heavenwards in vast 

 and ever vaster circles? That is the one object in 

 nature which has the effect of widening the prospect, 

 just as if the spectator had himself been miraculously 

 raised to a greater altitude, while at the same time 



