Page:Letters from India Vol 1.djvu/235

 Two very meritorious little parrots, the size of sparrows, who always slept hanging by their claws with their heads downwards, have died this week—of apoplexy, I suppose. And a paroquet with a plum-coloured head, who has every merit a paroquet can (and more than most human beings do) possess, is dangerously ill, and has its own doctor attending it twice a day.

Consider my feelings, the other day when I was sitting in my room, with half a dozen birds walking about the table, to see walk in with a large white Persian cat under each arm. ‘There,’ he said with a smile of extraordinary complacency, ‘I have brought you some quite new pets; remarkably handsome animals.’ Two spurious white tigers! in fact, had they been real tigers, the birds and I should have received them better; and the melancholy result is, that our maids, who, like all ladies-maids, have a natural love of cats, have each insisted upon having one. It is the knowledge of that fact which has preyed upon the paroquet’s spirits and is bringing him to an untimely grave.

Oh, my dear! such a beautiful cow’s tail