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THE STRAND MAGAZINE.

very dinner. The snatching of the dinner from somebody else's jaws, friend's or enemy's, is the main plot of most of the raven's jokes, causing him also to secrete a spare morsel in the baggy part of his lower beak, when other ravens are about. Extreme quickness lends additional quaintness to the pranks of the raven. The ravens at the Zoo, ever changing in personnel, remain true to a sort of mixed game of coddam and hunt the slipper. Let one of their number produce his stored morsel, and instantly it has been snatched, snatched, and snatched again, all along the line and back. With whom it at last rests only one mortal creature knows—the raven who has it. In him a natural exultation struggles with an attempt to look as though he had lost the tit-bit. In the others the chagrin of loss wars with a desire to look triumphant; so that the net result is a very level appearance of general stolidity.

Sardonic joker as he is, the raven has an immense sense of personal dignity. He is the greatest of the Corvidæ, and he knows it. Not for him the scrambling hilarity of his small cousin, the jackdaw. Don't injure the raven's self-esteem, or he will be revenged, at some time or another. I have known a tame raven wait for months for an opportunity of plucking off, before a large company, the wig of a lady of doubtful age who had referred to

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