Little 
Bird Friends. 
( 43 ) 
THE BIRD WORLD. 
be a highly-civilised country, and in¬ 
cluded Nubia and part of Egypt. Let 
us fancy we are there as it is to-day. 
The southern part is within the torrid 
zone. We can see the mysterious 
tropical forests stretching for miles, with 
large mimosa trees, tangled together 
with tough creepers, and giant grasses. 
Night comes on. Ah ! what is that we 
hear? The horrible howls of hyenas 
who are prowling after their prey. 
Herds of wild elephants are here, and 
lions, and where the streams flow we 
may find the hippopotamus, rhinoceros, 
and huge crocodiles. Now let us turn 
our eyes to the arid deserts of the North. 
There are long, flat plains, dry, sandy, 
and rocky, in many places quite 
bare of vegetation, except here and there 
coarse tufts of grass. But following 
the course of the River Nile, a strip of 
land on either bank is very fertile, and 
here cotton, tobacco, and dates are 
cultivated. Scattered over the sandy 
plains may be seen enormous ruins like 
the remains of mighty buildings. They 
are, indeed, ruins—relics from the time, 
probably many thousand years ago, when 
the Egyptians were in the glory of their 
civilisation, and built such magnificent 
temples and tombs that even now, in 
this twentieth century, it is a marvel to 
us how they achieved such work. The 
stones are elaborately carved, and in¬ 
scribed with strange writing, some of 
which is now understood, but some re¬ 
mains a mystery. 
(To be continued .) 
A Great Novelist’s 
Fql vo vi rites* 
From the “Life of R. L. Stevenson.” 
By GRAHAM BALFOUR. (Methuen, 1901). 
Robert Louis Stevenson, writing from 
Paris in 1878, says:—“ I have become a 
bird-fancier. I carry six little creatures 
no bigger than my thumb about with me 
almost all the day long; they are so 
pretty * and it is so nice to waken in the 
morning and hear them sing.” 
Six or seven years later he again 
alludes to these or to other similar pets: 
—“ There is only one sort of bird that I 
can tolerate caged, though even then I 
think it hard, and that is what is called 
in France the Bec-d’Argent (Silver Bill). 
I once had two of these pigmies in cap¬ 
tivity ; and in the quiet, bare house upon 
a silent street where I was then living 
their song, which was not much louder 
than a bee’s, but airily musical, kept 
me in a perpetual good humour. I put 
the cage upon my table when I worked, 
carried it with me when I went for meals, 
and kept it by my head at night: the first 
thing in the morning these maestrini 
would pipe up.” 
Since Stevenson’s death the chiefs 
have tabooed the use of firearms upon 
the hillside in Vailima where he lies, 
that the birds may live there undisturbed, 
and raise about his grave the songs he 
loved so well. 
