CHAP. II.] CAPRICIOUSNESS. 265 



the chance of being immortalised in some future edition 

 of Mr. Yarrell's standard bird book, the Guans should 

 think of a subsequent stanza : 



" It had been better of William a Trent 

 To have beene abede with sorrowe, 

 Than to be that day in the green wood shade, 

 To mete with Little John's arrowe." 



And so we are, at last and unwillingly, compelled to 

 subject them to occasional aviary confinement. Any 

 stranger to whom they take a fancy, or even a dislike, 

 they will follow off the premises as closely as a dog will 

 follow his own master. In their attachments they are 

 most capricious : one of the Guans always erects his 

 feathers and threatens an attack (which is executed if 

 permitted) whenever he sees our little girls ; and though 

 the other poultry were unnoticed, except when he had 

 any tit-bit in hand, a yellow Bantam Hen with a brood 

 of chicks was made a special object of aversion. The 

 Zoological Society's keepers inform me that their Guans 

 show similar marks of displeasure when certain strangers 

 are admitted into their aviaries. Mr. Jamrach had told 

 me that giving them raw meat occasionally would tend 

 to induce them to lay ; but they have had that, and all 

 the insects they chose to gather during their rambles, in 

 vain. With better accommodation and more elbow-room 

 than falls to the lot of many country clergymen, we have 

 still been unable to keep them from straying, and unless 

 our neighbours, on whom they have trespassed, had been 

 very obliging, they must long since have been destroyed, 

 or made off with. As it is, continual sixpences and pints 

 of beer to the bearer in reward for their restoration from 

 tree-tops and road sides, have made the "profit" as yet 

 derived from this proposed addition to our domestic birds 



