What we call the tail is only the tail covert, and the back view shows the real tail is of stiff feathers, arranged, when these are spread, in an inverted heart shape. Then comes a sudden noise like a loud sneeze, repeated again and again before one can see that it is caused by the sharp striking of the tail feathers against each other and the tail covert--and again he turns and paces.
He made a long solitary parade the other day on the grass, and finally crept through the hedge and into the poultry yard, where we followed him to discover that the whole elaborate proceeding had been carried on for the sake of one dull black hen, in a flurry about the egg she had left behind her.
He was waiting for these fowls the other day while, pending dinner, they had come to dig up a tulip bed. They were routed with ignominy and rushed home past him, indifferent to his presence; and as the pursuer turned he sent out after her an angry, discordant, mocking scream.
The bird is but a false prophet. He screams like a cheap trumpet out of tune when the dog barks, or children shout; and when all is still he fills the air with shrieks, till the superstitious tremble and the scientific say there will be rain to-morrow.
But the morrow rises with cloudless sky and fortunes, and the bird is again discredited. We impute his mistake to the fact that he revels in pessimism.
All of which shows the peacock seen _sub specie humanitatis_ and brings us not a whit nearer to what he is thinking, or rather is not thinking, in the small emptiness of his coroneted head. After all, there is very little head, and the tale of a peacock is mainly the story of his tail.
“_The flower of collie aristocracy, Yet, from his traits, how absent that reserve, That stillness on a base of power, which marks In men and mastiffs the selectly sprung._”
Taffy has had an education as many sided as that of a Jesuit. If he was to be sent for at once to Windsor Castle we should not have a qualm about his behaviour, unless, indeed, he should fall, like Guy Heavystone, into “the old reckless mood,” in which case he would loaf about the Royal stables when he should be in attendance on the Sovereign.
Taffy entered on the scene as an absurd speckled puppy of three months old. His hair was like tow, and of so strange a hue that when we presented only his back to a stranger he was rarely guessed to be a dog. Some said a rabbit and some a cat; some suggested a lemur, as no one knew what that was like; and some darkly hinted that we were harbouring a young hyæna.