OUR HOME BIRDS. 
215 
Patrick said with good care there might be fifty 
pairs of young ones by next summer. 
This did not throw very much light on the pigeon 
subject, to be sure, but Miss Harson accepted it with 
a smile, and went on to say : “ Pigeons are very easy 
to raise, give but little trouble, and abundantly pay 
their keeper for their food. They are satisfied with 
a corner of the barn-loft to live in, though a pigeon- 
house or dove-cote is of course nicer ; and the car- 
penter has certainly made Malcolm’s a very tasteful 
affair. Some farmers think that pigeons are very 
destructive to have around, saying that they dig up 
the grain after it is planted, and eat it, thus ruin- 
ing their crops. But this has been proved to be quite 
a slander on the poor pigeons, as they are not fur- 
nished with suitable bills for digging, and are gene- 
rally acknowledged to be ‘ dumb,’ so that they could 
not very well carry out any such plan as this. They 
will of course eat such grains as lie upon the ground, 
but any bird would do this ; and it is only taking 
what would otherwise be wasted. 
“ A person once shot a turtle-dove and took it to a 
naturalist to preserve, when he asked why it had been 
shot. The answer was that it was coolly feeding on 
some freshly-sown peas ; but when the naturalist 
opened its crop, instead of finding any such food, 
over a thousand seeds of weeds that are particularly 
