DAME NATURE’S') SCISSORS 5 
better than mine perhaps, or a great many other 
people’s, but still it is not good enough. In fact 
there is not one of us who has an imagination which 
is good enough to do things like that. We could 
never have imagined birds which are still more 
beautiful than those we have been talking about. 
Indeed we could never have imagined those that 
we fave been talking about. Only Dame Nature has 
been able to imagine them both. 
She can imagine anything, and the funny thing is 
that as she imagines it, there.it is—just as if she had 
cut it out with a pair of scissors. Perhaps she does 
do that. She is a lady—Dame Nature, you know— 
so she would know, how to use a pair of scissors. 
But what /er scissors are like and how she uses them 
and what sort of stuff it is that she cuts things out 
of, those are things which nobody knows. Only, there 
are the birds, not only the beautiful ones that you 
have seen, but a very great many others which you 
have never seen, and which are so very much more 
beautiful than the ones you have, that if you were to 
see those beside them, they would look quite—well 
no, not ugly—thrushes and blackbirds and swallows 
and robin-redbreasts could not look that—but in- 
significant—in comparison. | 
Now it is about some of those birds—the very 
beautiful birds of all, the most beautiful ones in the 
