74 WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIEDS. 



ing down everything I can find to give, but have been try- 

 ing to bite off the fingers that fed them !" 



" I am sorry for your fingers, dear, and you must let me 

 feed them hereafter but I like their appetite and their 

 spunk, they should have both, to sing as they are going to 

 sing!" 



" Well, brother have it your own way ; but I don't be- 

 lieve in making an angel out of a glutton !" 



This last remark rather stung me, for somehow or other, 

 since the discovery of the impaled lizards, I had been feeling 

 uncomfortable. I went to the cage, and they received me 

 with clamorous cries for more ! I immediately got for them 

 a quantity of food, such as I had supposed to be best for them, 

 from what I had read and heard of their habits. I found, to 

 my astonishment, that they would eat nothing but earth 

 worms and fresh meat farinaceous food they rejected with 

 disdain and certainly gulphed down as much as their own 

 weight every few hours. 



The thing was becoming more inexplicable, and what 

 made matters still worse, my sister, for the first time in her 

 life, refused to share my cares with me. She had taken a 

 most unconquerable dislike to the creatures ; declared she 

 was absolutely afraid of them, and shuddered when they 

 were brought near her. This reception of my new variety 

 mortified me excessively ; but I consoled myself that I was 

 doomed to the common martyrdom of discoverers, and 

 nursed my uncouth and boisterous pets with even the greater 

 assiduity that they were rejected of men ! 



I now let them run about the yard ; for I soon found that 

 the ravin in their maws constituted a sufficient parole of 

 honor to ensure their return to where food was to be obtain- 

 ed ; but one morning I witnessed a trick of one of my vaga- 

 bonds that considerably stumped me. He had straggled 

 around to the back of the house, and got into the poultry 

 yard. I saw him march very deliberately up to a brood of 

 young chickens, and without saying " by your leave" to any- 



