THE OSTRICH. 



The pheasant walks about Hke our famihar cock and hen, and has veiy 

 much the same habits. Though he can ascend a tree, yet, hke them, he hves 

 upon the ground, and runs very fast. When he is alarmed he runs off to 

 the nearest place of shelter, or even uses his wings. In this case he flies 

 heavily, like our common fowl. 



The mother bird takes very little trouble about her nest, and merely has 

 a slight hollow in the ground, on which she places a few leaves. Very often 

 she declines to take any trouble about her eggs, and then a hen has to be 

 fetched, and acts the part of a foster-mother. 



THE OSTRICH. 



In the barren wastes of Africa, and also of Asia, the traveller, as he journeys 

 wearily onward, meeting with but stunted herbage and no water, sees from 

 afar something that alarms him. It looks like a body of horsemen scouring 

 the desert, and, as he fears, bent on plunder. There is no way of escape, and 

 as he looks hither and thither the dreaded object approaches. Then his heart 

 beats more freely, and his spirits revive. The band of horsemen, as he 

 supposed it to be, turns out to be birds. And he is not the first traveller by 

 any means who has made the mistake, and imagined the ostrich to be a man 

 on horseback. 



In the first place, the ostrich is quite as tall, and as he runs swiftly along 

 there is nothing at a distance that he more resembles. He always feeds in a 

 flock, and the barren wastes have been his home from time immemorial. He 

 eats grass^ and grain when he can get it, and does not seem to care for water. 

 There are people who have said that the ostrich never drinks. 



However that may be, his appetite is the most curious part of him. He 

 will swallow almost anything he can pick up, and you might wonder where he 

 did pick up the things that have been found in his stomach, were it not for 

 the caravans that now and then come across the desert. Pieces of leather, 

 nails, lumps of brass or iron, to say nothing of stones, all go down his throat 

 with ease. 



