THE SADDLEBACK 169 
hesitating and vacillating before his harsh shrewish 
wife with many a supplicating glance and many 
an embarrassed baffled approach. 
Often—too often for chance to enter into the 
matter—the male is allowed only as it were by 
favour to enter into the nest and personally 
nourish the young. Advantage is taken of his 
amiability—to speak plainly, he is henpecked in 
no common degree. When, for instance, both 
cock and hen have been away from the nest, the 
hen will not infrequently return with an empty 
bill. She will then hang about the vicinity till 
her hard-worked mate returns, take food—some- 
times the whole of it—from his bill, feed it to her 
chicks as if collected by herself, and then only 
settle into her nest. I conceive the chicks, reared 
in the belief that their mother toils whilst their 
father idles, allowed to think in her absences 
that she has been doing what she has not been 
doing, just as bad people who have shirked Sunday 
service will in the street mingle with the devout, 
passing off themselves also as worshippers. 
Although, however, the female thus cows the 
male, both alike are bullied by other breeds. 
There is always an especial pleasure in plucking 
out the heart of the mystery of a species the 
essential characteristic of a breed. The pre- 
dominant trait certainly of the Saddleback is an 
exceeding mildness and gentleness of disposition, 
