A HAPPY FAMILY. 
49 
scratching on the poll, they seem dejected for the day. 
As for Betty, the cockatoo parrot, she says plainly, 
“ Scratch poor Betty's poll; Betty wants her poll 
scratched;" and scratched it must he over and over 
again before Betty will turn to her bread and milk, and 
allow an interval for conversation. Then we have a pair 
of Australian ground parroquets; two splendid macaws 
that dazzle the eye with their oriental plumes of azure 
and vermillion; a pair of slender and brilliantly-coloured 
lories, that have never yet, and never will, acquire more 
speech than the utterance of their names; and a pair of 
Brazilian toucans, with enormous bills, and plumage 
more dazzling than the dress of a harlequin. 
You would just think yourself in Babel, were you to 
be spiritually present when we sit down to breakfast 
surrounded by these, the noisiest members of our happy 
family. But if you were present in the body also, I 
would insure complete silence by one clap of the hand 
and you should hear a pin drop if you wished it. Then 
one by one each should go through its performances of 
imitating a farm-yard, a fiddle, a pair of bagpipes, or a 
series of incoherent but very comical speeches. Old 
Poll is the only one that would occasion trouble; and 
she is so self-willed, that you would have to take your 
chance whether she would take breakfast with us and 
talk like a Christian, or cough, bark, and growl you into 
a state of stupid deafness. But if all went well, Polly 
would be a polyglot; for she can gabble French, 
German, and Latin with very tolerable accent, and mix 
with her classical quotations the more familiar sounds of 
“ Beer, ho," “Ba -leer” and the words and air of “ Pretty, 
