64 
ALEXANDRINE PABBAKEET. 
agriculturists tliat massacred tlie Parrots the late Mr. C. Buxton would 
otherwise have successfully acclimatised at Northrepps Hall. 
Well, Mr. Wood, seemingly, was no prentice hand at tuition, which 
may, no doubt does, account for his success in mastering the Alex- 
andrine favourite of his pupil: we have made the same attempt, with 
more than one Parrot, Parrakeet and Cockatoo, but always with the 
same result — ignominious discomfiture. We are in no wise disheartened, 
however, and mean to try again — and again if it should be necessary, 
but as wo have said, the acquisition of the habit can certainly be 
prevented. 
All these birds are extremely fond of company, and cannot bear to 
be left alone for an instant; hence they are more suitable for out-door 
aviaries, or a conservatory where, swinging on a perch, or hung up 
against a background of elms or lime-trees, or of palms and tree ferns, 
as the case may be, they add materially to the attractiveness of the 
scene, and their screaming is not as noticeable as when they are kept 
in a room. 
They are very sensitive too, and take likings and dislikings at first 
sight; nor can any subsequent conduct of the individual concerned 
induce them to modify their first impressions. 
Some of them become friendly at once with all their lady visitors, 
and object most vehemently to men and boj's; while others again are 
womcn-haters, and will allow a man to do anything with them: scratch 
their head, take them out of their cage, feed them from between his 
lips, and so on; and when they have once formed an attachment, no 
matter how ill-placed it may be, nothing will induce them to transfer 
it elsewhere, they are nothing if not constant; their motto, “Foi est 
tout.” 
Volumes might be, and actually have been, filled with anecdotes of 
this favourite bird and its congeners, but we shall content ourselves 
with one related by Mr. Gedney, in his entertaining and instructive little 
work on Parrots and Parrahocts . — “It was my miserable fate,^'’ writes 
that gentleman, “to be left in ill-health at Singapore, suffering, in 
fact, from that species of Tead-poisoning' which was very common 
during the Indian mutiny, and although it was, perhaps, unreasonable 
of me not to ‘slip my cable ^ when such a result was expected, still 
I had a young Joque monkey and a Eing-necked Parrakeet, and their 
presence did more towards my recovery than all the physio, lint and 
lotion of old Bolus. Poor Jacko had a knotted rope suspended from 
the rafter; with a few cross pieces of wood put through the strands, 
making perches, upon which he dozed and plotted schemes of revenge 
against Polly, or, it may be, meditated upon the chances of stealing 
