The Rev. Hubert D. Asteey,



198



cheese on his knee. Tommy, from the floor, stretched himself

up on tip-toe, peered about, and without more to-do hopped on

to the sofa by his side, and thence on to his arm where he very

quickly seized the piece of cheese offered in his fingers. And

this was the shy, timid bird that I must take care not to disturb,

or handle ! ! Would Mr. Phillipps have ever spared him to me,

could he have seen him then ? ! ! I shouldn’t have blamed him,

if he hadn’t.


And after a fortnight I hardly dared let him out ! and

why ? simply because he had become so arrogant and autocratic,

that he flew at me like a furious game-cock, settling on my hand,

and pecking till he drew blood.


I11 three days’ time after his arrival, he began to sing,

sotto voce ; to record, as they say, and a very pretty warble it

was, sometimes like a Blackbird’s, but intermingled with curious

bubbling and guttural notes, which remind me of the manner

in which a Blue Rock Thrush sings.


By the iotli of November his new tail was full grown, and

his whole plumage, from daily baths, wholesome food, and fresh

air by day and night, in beautiful condition.


As to the other one, which at first I thought to be a

female, but about whose sex I am now doubtful*, it is true that

for a tew days it was decidedly timid, but not too timid in the

small out-door aviary in which I had placed it, to come down

and take a bath as well as food within two yards of me. The

traces of fits, about which Mr. Phillipps had warned me, were

still visible in a certain twirling of the head and an unsteadiness

of gait, but in a week those symptoms had quite disappeared, and

the bird was as strong as possible, very quickly becoming glossy

in plumage, and tamer. But in a week this bird also was

‘recording’ in exactly the same tones as ‘Tommy’; so that,

although hen birds of some species, especially perhaps of the

Thrush family, do record in Autumn, I began to wonder whether

that also might turu out to be a male. The sexes are alike

in the Myiophoneus family (I believe), but this second bird is

more slender in shape, more leggy, and of more feminine



March, 1903. There is now not much doubt that it is a male bird also.—H. I). A.



