I once went into my cabin and found two Liliputian deer in my bed. It was our engineer who had placed them there. We were lying off Lamoo, and he had brought them from shore.

"Ye'll just be a faither to the lammies, doctor," he said, "for I'm no on vera guid terms wi' the skipper."

They were exactly the size of an Italian greyhound, perfectly formed, and exceedingly graceful. They were too tender, poor things, for life on shipboard, and did not live long.

In the stormy latitudes of the Cape, the sailors used to amuse themselves by catching Cape pigeons, thus: a little bit of wood floated astern attached by a string, a few pieces of fat thrown into the water, and the birds, flying tack and half-tack towards them, came athwart the line, by a dexterous movement of which they entangled their wings, and landed them on board. They caught albatrosses in the same fashion, and nothing untoward occurred.

I had for many months a gentle, loving pet in the shape of a snow-white dove. I had bought him that I might make feather-flowers from his plumage; but the boy brought him off alive, and I never had the heart to kill him. So he lived in a leathern hat-box, and daily took his perch on my shoulder at meal-times.*

It was my lot once upon a time to be down with fever in India. The room in which I lay was the upper flat of an antiquated building, in a rather lonely part of the suburbs of a town. It had three windows, close to which grew a large banyan-tree, beneath the shade of whose branches the crew of a line-of-battle ship might have hung their hammocks with comfort. The tree was inhabited by a colony of crows; we stood-the crows and I-in the relation of * Vide page 178.

Aileen Aroon.

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over-the-way to each other. Now, of all birds that fly, the Indian crow must bear the palm for audacity. Living by his wits, he is ever on the best of terms with himself, and his impudence leads him to dare anything. Whenever, by any chance, Pandoo, my attendant, left the room, these black gentry paid me a visit. Hopping in by the score, and regarding me no more than the bed-post, they commenced a minute inspection of everything in the room, trying to destroy everything that could not be eaten or carried away. They rent the towels, drilled holes in my uniform, stole the buttons from my coat, and smashed my bottles. One used to sit on a screen close by my bed every day, and scan my face with his evil eye, saying as plainly as could be—" You're getting thinner and beautifully less; in a day or two, you won't be able to lift a hand; then I'll have the pleasure of picking out your two eyes."

Amid such doings, my servant would generally come to my relief, perhaps to find such a scene as this: Two or three pairs of hostile crows with their feathers standing up around their necks, engaged in deadly combat on the floor over a silver spoon or a tooth-brush; half a dozen perched upon every available chair; an unfortunate lizard with a crow at each end of it, getting whirled wildly round the room, each crow thinking he had the best right to it; crows everywhere, hopping about on the table, and drinking from the bath; crows perched on the window-sill, and more crows about to come, and each crow doing all in his power to make the greatest possible noise. The faithful Pandoo would take all this in at a glance; then would ensue a helter-skelter retreat, and the windows be darkened by the black wings of the flying crows, then silence for a moment, only broken by some apologetic remark from Pandoo.

When at length happy days of convalescence came round, and I was able to get up and even eat my meals at table, I found my friends the crows a little more civil and respectful. The thought occurred to me to make friends with them; I consequently began a regular system of feeding them after every meal-time. One old crow I caught, and chained to a chair with a fiddle-string. He was a funny old fellow, with one club-foot. He never refused his food from the very day of his captivity, and I soon taught him a few tricks. One was to lie on his back when so placed for any length of time till set on his legs again. This was called turning the turtle. But one day this bird of freedom hopped away, fiddle-string and all, and a whole fortnight elapsed before I saw him again. I was just beginning to put faith in a belief common in India-namely, that a crow or any other bird, that has been for any time living with human beings, is put to instant death the moment he returns to the bosom of his family; when one day, while engaged breakfasting some forty crows, my club-footed pet reappeared, and actually picked the bit from my hand, and ever after, until I left, he came regularly thrice a day to be fed. The other crows came with surprising exactness at meal-times; first one would alight on the shutter outside the window, and peep in, as if to ascertain how nearly done I happened to be, then fly away for five or ten minutes, when he would return, and have another keek. As soon, however, as I approached the window, and raised my arm, I was saluted with a chorus of cawing from the banyan tree; then down they swooped in dozens; and it was no very easy task to fill so many mouths, although the loaves were Government ones.

These pets had a deadly enemy in a brown raven-the Brahma kite; swifter than arrow from bow he descended,