THE PEACOCK 269 



with a bird of such fine plumes and stately bearing. It 

 must have been a fairly familiar ornament of rich men's 

 gardens, but how soon it became the fashion to have such 

 ornaments we do not know. It probably came into 

 Greece from Persia, a country with which, as every school- 

 boy knows, the Greeks had a good deal of intercourse, often 

 of a very stormy kind. 



When, however, in later years, under that mighty 

 conqueror, Alexander the Great, Greek warriors marched 

 eastward as far as India and saw these brilliant birds 

 flaunting their beauties in their native sunshine, they 

 appear to have regarded them as novel and wonderful. 

 It was decreed among them that no Peacocks were to 

 be killed. 



The rich Romans, who seem to have ransacked the 

 whole world, as it was then known, to find new things to 

 eat and drink, added the Peacock to their long list of 

 table dainties. They even bred and fattened them for 

 that purpose, as we rear geese and turkeys. 



In England, whither the Peacock was brought from 

 abroad to grace the gardens of the great, it seems to 

 have soon become a favourite dish for the table. An old 

 Elizabethan writer, William Harrison, mentions " Peacocks 

 of Ind" as among the "tame fowl" kept in many farm- 

 yards. But we know that at many a grand banquet it 

 was brought in, plumes and all, on a great dish, with 

 almost as much state as the boar's head on Christmas Day. 

 When so brought, the Peacock was said to be served up 

 " in his pride." 



Some of my older readers may remember the grand 

 Florentine feast in that wonderful story of Roinola, in 

 which the fashionable but very indigestible bird, arrayed 

 in his feathers, formed one of the courses. Every guest 



