THOMAS NED FINDS A PEARL OF PRICE. 235 



its protean forms, by fire, flood, field and sea. Noth- 

 ing now remains for the writer of that class of fiction 

 that human ingenuity can suggest or desperate wits 

 invent. 



This being so, how can I expect to excite interest 

 in my homely narrative of everyday doings, unless I 

 pick out all the plums in my pudding and set them 

 before the literary Lucullus all in a row ? How, 

 indeed ? And, dear me ! the " plums " of adventure 

 in real life are so very few, and the days when one 

 has no adventure at all worth the telling so very many, 

 that the task seems discouraging ! 



Now, of the one hundred and fifty birds in my 

 island, every one was to me extremely interesting ; 

 but to one who has not seen them there, sporting in 

 the trees and singing in the shrubs, they can not, of 

 course, seem so attractive. A whole host of feathered 

 claimants appears before me, when I try to summon 

 from the chambers of memory those I have seen in 

 their haunts and place them before my readers in 

 order of attractiveness. 



The family most fully represented, perhaps, was 

 that containing the " waders," such as the herons and 

 bitterns, and those most attractive of water birds, the 

 gallinules. These last are about a foot in length, with 

 eyes bright crimson, a beak painted vermilion tipped 

 with yellow, and a frontal plate, like a shield, be- 

 tween the eyes, pale blue in color. The largest speci- 

 men of the wader family ever seen here is the jabiru, 

 or great South American stork, which probably wan- 

 dered hither from the savannas of the Orinoco. It is 



