152 BOMBAY DUCKS 
the cat was devotedly attached to the old lady who 
died, and that it understood the nature of death; we 
must further suppose, if we are to credit this absurd 
story, that the cat knew what a coffin was, could dis- 
tinguish between it and any other box, and when it saw 
it, inferred that the remains of the deceased were shut 
up in it. Further, since the cat screamed the moment 
it caught sight of the coffin, it must have put two and 
two together in an incredibly short space of time. 
Of all the disseminators of unnatural history the 
British poets are the most deserving of censure. 
Tennyson, Morris, and Sir Edwin Arnold are excep- 
tions, but all the rest, as Phil Robinson rightly observes, 
“betray a systematized lack of sympathy with the 
natural world which is expressed in formulated pre- 
judices,” 
The greatest calamity that can overtake a bird is to 
fall into the hands of the average British poet. No 
myth is too nonsensical to be swallowed by that worthy. 
The bards are quite content to echo all the absurd 
statements of the ancients. The bird of paradise has no 
feet, so sleeps on the wing, lays and hatches her eggs in 
mid-air. The pelican sacrifices her life in order to give 
her young ones a single meal. How the young fare 
after the mother’s death, we are not told; presumably 
the father then “chips in,” and after him the uncles and 
aunts shed their “life blood” in order that the young 
hopefuls may have a meal. The swan, of course, sings 
before death. Says Byron: “There, swan-like, let me 
sing and die.” 
All the other common birds receive similar treatment 
