260 TEXAS AND ARIZONA 



looks like a bird to me. His enormously long tail 

 feathers are so fantastic, so almost grotesque ! 

 They render him a kind of monstrosity. One 

 feels as if he had been made, not born ; and some 

 Oriental must have been the maker. 



Yet if ever a bird was alive, he is. His spirits 

 are effervescent and apparently inexhaustible. 

 Few birds are noisier or more continually on the 

 move. When six or eight scissor-tails meet for 

 consultation in one small tree, even though it be 

 in a cemetery, there are " great doings," as the 

 country phrase is. What the disturbance is all 

 about, it is beyond me to tell, but it seems a rea- 

 sonable assumption that it has to do somehow 

 with questions of love and marriage. So far as I 

 have noticed, such sessions do not last long. In 

 the nature of things they cannot. The hubbub in- 

 creases, the discussion, whatever its subject, waxes 

 more and more animated, and then, of a sudden, 

 the assembly breaks up (I was going to say ex- 

 plodes), and away fly the birds (and the birds' 

 tails), every one still contending for the last 

 word. 



But there is no need of six or eight to set the 

 pot bubbling. Two are a plenty ; and indeed I 

 suspect that a single bird would have it out with 

 himself rather than forego for an hour or two 

 the excitement of a shindy. In temperament the 



