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344 splash its water and seed about of a morning. For the rest of the day it is mostly hopping off the floor on to the perch and back again, except when you go to look at it close. It then hops only sideways off the perch on to the wires of the cage, and back again.

But the parrot! It is dead now — and it took as much burying as a horse — was more of a reptile than a bird, I should say. At any rate, it had very few feathers on it after a bit, and the way it worried my wife’s Maltese terrier was most unusual, I fancy, in a bird. The first time it pounced down on Tiny, who was only going to eat some of the parrot’s pudding, we thought it was going to eat the dog, though I found, on looking it up since, that parrots never eat other animals, as vultures and other birds do sometimes. But it wasn’t. It was only pulling fluff off the dog. But Tiny’s fluff grows so fast, and he is so light, that we generally pick him up by it. And so, when the parrot began to pull at it, it rolled the dog all about, and as one of the bird’s claws got caught in the fluff of the dog and the other in the fluff of the hearth-rug, they got rolled up in the corner of it, — the terrier and the parrot together; and the noises that proceeded from those two, and the confusion there was of hearth-rug and fluff and feathers, defies all description. Getting them unmixed took us ever so long. We had first of all to give the parrot a spoon to hold in its mouth, and then a fork in one claw, while we undid the other. And as soon as it was undone, it got its claw fixed round my thumb, and then, dropping the spoon, it took hold of my cuff with its beak. And when I had got the bird off me, it got fastened on to my wife; for the thing was so frightened at itself, it wanted something, it didn’t matter what, to hold on to. But