Couriers of the Air. 69 



to the telegram is required. The platform 

 leading into the pigeon-house is connected 

 with an electric bell that rings when the pigeon, 

 reaching home, alights on the platform, and thus 

 notifies the servants the arrival of a telegram ; 

 one of them then goes and unties it from the 

 bird's neck. Much saving in porterage is thus 

 accomplished ; the telegrams are delivered in a 

 few minutes, and rarely, if ever, lost. The 

 ordinary homing pigeon is best adapted for the 

 purpose, being an inexpensive purchase. In proof 

 of this fitness the following most remarkable 

 incident may be recorded. A number of English 

 homers were recently sent to Lassay, an inland 

 town of France, but for some reason the French 

 police authorities refused to start them, and the 

 birds were relegated to Cherbourg, where they 

 were liberated at 7 a.m. One of them was seen 

 to alight on the roof of its loft at 11.30 the same 

 forenoon. It had accomplished the entire dis- 

 tance of about three hundred miles, including 

 one hundred miles of water, in a bee-line from 

 Cherbourg to Birkenhead at the rate of over a 

 mile a minute. This particular bird had never 

 been any great distance from home, and although 

 English bred it was from a famous strain of 

 Belgian "homers." The large provincial towns 

 in the north of England are the great centres 

 of pigeon-flying. Recently as many as two 

 thousand five hundred birds were liberated at a 



