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greatly to distinguish them from other jackdaws except the colour of their feathers. I have known many jackdaws and have possessed a few, but cannot, by any effort, imagine one of them doing anything particularly virtuous; jackdaws by nature are not intended to be pious. I have a jackdaw now who is a most interesting and pleasing thief, liar, and bully, but he neglects the more usual moral qualities. As a thief and a liar his performances are probably no more remarkable than those of other jackdaws, but as a bully he has ways of his own. He bullies every living thing with less brains than himself, irrespective of size, and eats such of them as are small enough. He hectors cats tremendously—merely by force of superior intellect. When a cat perceives a bird—the size of some she is in the habit of trying to catch—pelting headlong toward her down a garden-path, with furious eyes and beak, shouting "Hullo, Jack! Shut up! Shut up! Come along, old girl! Hi! hi! hi!"—that cat has some excuse for hastily retiring over the wall to think things over; and Jack cocks his head and chuckles. He bullies dogs when they will allow it; when he meets one that won't, he finds a safe perch and abuses him violently. He will even bully a housemaid who is afraid of having her heels pecked. Once he went on a visit and tried to bully Elijah, but that was very nearly being another tale. Elijah is not the sort of bird anyone would bully for pastime, and Jack found speed as useful as intellect, for once in a way. But if he came to the Zoo to-morrow, he would probably begin by bullying Jung Perchad.

A gasp of business-like seriousness.
Stiggins.

The raven was never meant to be bullied. He is a wag, certainly, but a wag of a satanic sort. His very chuckle is fierce; and when the heat makes him open his mouth to pant, it isn't with a lachrymation, as the chaplain crow, nor with a grin, as the magpie, but with a severe and business-like seriousness, that says plainly that somebody's heels must be bitten for this; preferably, I imagine, Apollo's, as the