6 2 THE TRIBES ON MY FRONTIER. 



about my premises, for the claims of a hungry family will 

 drive crows to even more reckless wickedness than their 

 own inbred depravity. They will appropriate hens' eggs, 

 murder nestling pigeons, attempt the life of the canary, and 

 every now and then startle you with some entirely new and 

 unthinkable felony. 



Most young things in nature are engaging. We grow 

 more unlovely as we grow older. What is prettier than a 

 downy chicken, a precocious kid, a young mouse not an inch 

 long, or that little woolly image of comfort, an infant rabbit, 

 when it first shows its round face at the door of its nursery ? 

 But new-fledged crows are a staring exception to the rule. 

 They are graceless crudities, with glazed eyes and raw red 

 throats, which they show you about three times a minute, 

 when they open their mouth to emit an inane caw. They 

 should be put to death offhand. 



All the above remarks refer of course to the grey-necked 

 crow. To make them applicable to the large black crow, 

 they must be discounted ten to fifteen per cent. There is 

 some sturdiness of character in the black crow ; it is a down- 

 right, above-board blackguard, and my feelings towards it 

 have some semblance of respect. 



There is yet another species of crow, v/hich has never 



