Nor was this behaviour in any way exceptional. A better-disposed creature than the duck does not exist. “I have kept and closely watched hundreds of ducks,” writes Mr. S. M. Hawkes, “but I never saw them fight with each other, nor ever knew a duck the aggressor in a dispute with some other kind of fowl.” Yet the duck is no coward. The drake is a warrior every inch of him, constant in affection, and violent in love and wrath. If the adult duck is so lovable, how much more so is the duckling! What a source of delight are those golden fluff balls to a child. On seeing them for the first time nine out of ten children will cry—
But I want one to play with—Oh I want A little yellow duck to take to bed with me!
The eagle is a bird that deserves much sympathy, for he has seen better times. Until a few years ago the pride of place among the fowls of the air was always given to the eagle. “Which eagle?” you ask. I reply, “_The_ eagle.” The poets, who have ever been the bird’s trumpeters, know but one eagle upon which they lavish such epithets as “the imperial bird,” “the royal eagle,” “the monarch bird,” “lord of land and sea,” “the wide-ruling eagle,” “the prince of all the feathered kind,” “the king of birds,” “the bird of heaven,” “the Olympic eagle,” “the bold imperial bird of Jove,” and so on, _ad nauseam_.
The eagle of the poets was truly regal. But somebody discovered, one day, that this bird is, like the phœnix, a mythical creature. Eagles do exist—many species of them—but they are very ordinary creatures, in no way answering to the description of the poet’s pet fowl. This, of course, is not the fault of the eagles. They are not to blame because the bards have, with one accord, combined to idealise them. Nevertheless, men, now that they have found out the truth, seem to bear a grudge against the eagle. They are not content with dethroning him, they must needs throw mud at him. It is the present custom to vilify the eagle, to speak of him as though he were an opponent at an election, to dub him a cowardly carrion feeder, little if anything better than a common vulture. Let us, therefore, give the poor out-at-elbows bird an innings to-day and see what we can do for him.