Now, a "scansorial zig-zag" may be interpreted to mean a graded path
up a cliff--does mean it, in fact, if you like to use the phrase in
that sense. I don't. Scansores are climbing birds--toucans, parrots,
parrakeets, cockatoos, macaws, lories, and woodpeckers. In the house
numbered 54 and 55 on the plan of the Gardens (having two numbers for
no particular reason except that one would be quite enough), all these
birds are represented except the woodpecker. The woodpecker is also
excluded from this zig-zag for similar reasons, which I can't remember
at this moment. One may be the fact of the woodpecker tapping, whereas
all taps is vanities.
[Illustration: YES?]
[Illustration: REALLY?]
[Illustration: DEAR, DEAR!]
[Illustration: INDEED!]
[Illustration: THERE NOW!]
A toucan is a beak, fitted with an inadequate bird at the hinder end.
It is over against the wall, opposite the front door of 54 and 55, that
one recognises the fine Roman nose of the toucan. A green nose, a red
nose, a yellow nose, a black nose, all these colours you may see, but
all nobly Roman as to shape. The toucan will not talk in the manner of
the parrot, but he (or she) is an admirable listener. I have told the
green-billed toucan many stories of bird-scandal without interruption,
and, on the whole, the conversation has been most improving. "Dear,
dear!"--"Really, now"--"Who'd have thought it?"--"No--o--o--o! You
don't really say so? Well, you do surprise me!" These are the only
contributions offered to the talk by the green-billed toucan, and even
these are only in pantomime. An ideal listener, the toucan. I have a
horrible temptation to say that toucan play at that game, and that if
you are anxious not to be toucandid, you toucan say nothing, and the
bird will listen just as respectfully; but a pious bringing-up enables
me to cast the temptation from me--toucancel the inclination, in fact.
Howbeit, the truth remains that the toucan will listen with perfect
attention whether you proffer information aloud or get no further than
inventing it.
The toucan will chatter horribly in native freedom, but that is
only when many hundreds of other toucans are present to keep it in
countenance; for the toucan's voice is not pretty, and he knows it.
Still, when hundreds assemble, every one with a discordant voice,
nothing is more natural than that they should all shout at once, and
unite in the belief that the performance is admirable. If there were
any ugly women (there are not, of course--it is a mere hypothesis),
and they were all collected together to the number of many hundreds on
a solitary island, the first thing they would do would be to hold a
beauty show with a prize for everybody, and next they would fight over
the distribution of those prizes. The toucans do something very much
like this--minus the fighting, because the prize is mutual admiration.
They chatter and scream in their hundreds--taking care to leave a
sentinel on guard, because other animals won't stand anything, even in
South America--and at intervals they all join in a simultaneous yell
of approbation, audible half a league off. The whole performance is a
sad piece of humbug, which makes one marvel greatly that because of it
the South American natives call the toucan the Preacher-bird. Here,
with so many gorgeous parrots and macaws about, the toucan behaves
with becoming modesty, but in the presence of any duller-clad bird
than itself its arrogance is frightful. A great crowd of toucans will
mob any such unfortunate creature with much chatter, till, surrounded
by long and threatening bills, like a despairing debtor, he "hops the
twig"--if he can.
[Illustration: SLEEP.]
[Illustration: GRADUAL--]
[Illustration: AWAKENING.]
[Illustration: OH, SUCH A HEAD!]
[Illustration: TRY BREAKFAST.]
[Illustration: OH, I CAN'T!]
[Illustration: WELL, HERE GOES]
[Illustration: OH!]
[Illustration: NO.]
[Illustration: I CAN'T--]
[Illustration: TOUCH ANOTHER.]
[Illustration: UGH!]
Perhaps the most dissipated-looking creature in the animal kingdom is a
toucan during a bad moult. You long to give him a gallon of soda-water
and a temperance tract. He sleeps much (a toucan always sleeps with his
beak over his shoulder and covered by his wing--he doesn't mean to have
that nose stolen)--he sleeps as much as possible, and wakes as seedy
as one can imagine. He can scarcely drag his beak off his back without
banging it on his perch, and considers the question of breakfast with
a shudder. With many blinks he strives desperately to pull himself
together--to pull together a handful of loose quills and a beak. They
give him grapes; it is a mockery. Who can eat grapes with such a head?
He may struggle with a grape perhaps for a few seconds, but breakfast
beats him in the end, and he retires to a repentant corner. What a
night it must have been!
[Illustration: A LITTLE HORSEY]
Out of his moult, however, and in good feather, the toucan is rather a
fine bird, so long as you forget his nose. The Ariel toucan here--with
the black beak--is a little horsey in aspect--a very little--but quite
neat and gentlemanly. Not such a real old crusted Tory-club-window
gentleman as the Triton cockatoo, but still a gentleman. As for the
green-billed toucan, she can never be anything but a good-natured
Jewess in her most gorgeous Shabbos clothes.
[Illustration: "VELL RACHAEL!"]
The comparative quietness of the toucans in house number 54-55 is,
probably, due to a worse thing--the noise of the parrots and cockatoos;
the house can hold no more noise, and the toucans altogether despair
of ever making themselves heard. Why the windows are so rarely broken
I can scarcely understand, except on the hypothesis of a suspension of
natural laws for the benefit of natural science and its institutions.
The keeper says he doesn't mind the noise--to such torture may human
nature be accommodated by long habit. Saint Cecilia would have become
accustomed to boiling if she had had forty years of it. The other
saint (male, but I forget which) who was grilled could never have done
without his hot gridiron if he had been able to keep on it for forty
years, the time this keeper has been among these parrots. Personally, I
should expect to become reconciled to boiling, grilling, or any other
class of plain cookery, in about half the time that would elapse before
a few hundred competitive parrot-yells began to feel soothing to the
nerves.
There is no other house in these Gardens where the unobtrusive visitor
is so made to feel his utter smallness and insignificance--and that
by mere brazen clamour--as in this. The elephants look large--they
_are_ large--but the elephants behave with gentlemanly quietness and
self-respect. The parrots rise up and curse you (and everything else)
with sudden and painful unanimity. You are appalled, dwarfed, made
insignificant and ashamed by the overpowering vastness of--the mere row.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN (CRUSTED).]
The fact is that each single individual of this crowd of parrots,
cockatoos, macaws, and parrakeets holds his own importance above every
other created thing as a prime article of belief, and is naturally and
most virtuously indignant when he finds that you don't go directly to
him and load him with presents. Therefore, he blares and screams at
you, till the air swims in your ears and eyes and the outer world is
but a chaos of great beaks, angry combs, and streaks of red, green,
and white. If you venture so far as to make an invidious selection,
and tender a peace-offering to a particular bird, you draw down upon
your devoted head the double rage and united jealousy of all the other
parrots, cockatoos, parrakeets, and macaws, each convinced that you
couldn't possibly have seen _him_ or you would never have slighted
so superlative a creature; and again the air and the colours swim to
your senses. The whole sensation is not unlike that produced by a long
inspection of immense thundering and shrieking engineering works.
You feel bewildered and you feel small: and everything about you is
metallic and mechanical. Every movement of a parrot, if you will but
notice it, is suggestive of metal joints and mechanical action; and the
voice--but there is no metal metallic enough to emit such a voice as
that at its worst.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
There is a married couple here--Triton cockatoos--near the keeper's
room. They nag and quarrel and snarl at one another, and all on
strictly mechanical principles. Their only gibe is an inarticulate
snarl delivered when repartee seems unlikely. Thus, Mr. C. observing
Mrs. C. apparently asleep will snarl ferociously, and compose himself
to rest. In a little while Mrs. C. will rouse herself, and perceiving
the placid quiescence of Mr. C., will snarl at him and go to sleep
again: all this with a mechanic jerk of the head and neck suggestive
of Punch or an automaton. After a while, perhaps, the inclination for
a snarl will take both at once, and, finding themselves face to face,
with nothing original to say, they will subside and sulk for the rest
of the day, each trying hard to think of some particularly unkind
remark to hurl at the other.
[Illustration: "YAP--YAP!"]
[Illustration: "YAP!"]
[Illustration: SULK.]
[Illustration: "Y----"]
[Illustration: SULK.]
Cocky, the big Triton, has been moved here from the insect-house, and
shows signs of forgetting his English. That is what will occur in a
congregation of this sort. The marvel is that many of the birds will
still talk at all. An old, rose-crested cockatoo will dance gracefully,
with his head on one side (and his eye on the reward), at the offer of
a nut. He is called Cocky, in common with all of his kind, just as the
parrot is always Polly; but I prefer to call him Richardson, because
his is, practically speaking, the only show in the fair. There is a
slender-billed cockatoo, who offers me a warlike challenge to "come
on" whenever I approach him, and a few more who have a word or two,
but Richardson is the only bird capable of a decent show. He will
stand at his cage wires and bawl out "What ho! what ho! what ho!" in a
way that confirms his classification as a showman and gives a hint of
aspirations to tragedy. Richardson is the least mechanical of the birds
here, and is a most respectable and old-fashioned veteran, who would
look quite in character taking snuff, and whose polite accomplishments
have not been ruined by his residence among unmannered crowds of other
birds.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: OPEN.]
[Illustration: SHUT.]
But, mannered or not, here is nothing but a crowd of screaming,
unfeeling, snapping painted machines. I have never seen a plucked
parrot, but I know, without seeing, that you have only to pluck one to
lay bare nuts and bolts, cams, hinges, springs, cranks, and metallic
joints. See a cockatoo spread and shut his crest: clearly it is just
the motion that could be actuated by a string on the wooden harlequin
principle: probably, as there is no string, there is a long spiral
spring under the feathers of the head (just lying along where some
people part their hair) set going by a catch on the principle of the
air-gun trigger. As to the gorgeous mechanisms on perches that hang
in a line down the main aisle, every joint, sound, and motion spells
"clockwork" aloud. Such of these as speak have one word, which is
"Hullo!" This, in varying degrees of urgency and gruffness, will
greet you as you pass along the line--if you show any indication of
nuts; otherwise you are insignificant, and unworthy of notice. One
fine blue and yellow machine will not say "Hullo" without receiving a
nut in advance; probably being constructed on the familiar automatic
principle. But it is all an expressionless outcome of clockwork.
[Illustration: "_Hullo!_"]
[Illustration: "WHAT HO!"]
[Illustration: "_Hullo!_"]
[Illustration: "Hullo!"]
[Illustration: "Hullo!"]
[Illustration: "HULLO!"]
[Illustration: "HULLO!"]
[Illustration: "HULLO!"]
[Illustration: "HULLO!"]
We seldom see among the lists of "patents sealed" and "provisional
protections" granted, any reference to an invention for improvements in
the mechanism of parrots and cockatoos. It is a remarkable thing that
so obvious a field for invention and improvement should have been so
much neglected. Plainly, an easy and obvious improvement would be the
provision of a simple shut-off valve, by which the suffering proprietor
could stop the parrot's steam whistle when desired. The desirability
of some such improvement need not be enlarged upon, and, once the
appliance were in the market, every parrot-owner would hasten to have
it fitted to his machine. Another contrivance, having the same object,
would consist of a self-acting escape valve, by which the familiar
scream of the mechanism would be diverted, and escape noiselessly
through a small grating at the back of the neck after a certain degree
of pressure had been attained. Moreover, what more easy than to have
the outer side of the jaw-hinge fitted with a convenient butterfly-nut,
by tightening which, after the periodical stoking with maize and so
forth, the engine would be prevented from nipping carelessly-offered
fingers? As it is at present, the jaw-hinge is a mere ordinary pair
of sharp pincers barbarically ornamented with feathers and colours.
Improvements suggest themselves at every point. Many of these otherwise
amusing instruments cause trouble by occasionally breaking out into
startling and exceedingly forcible language. It would seem that a
pressure valve might be profitably employed in this case also, by
means of which, as soon as the expressions reached to the degree of
"blow it," or "shut up," the power would be immediately diverted, and
either allowed to escape harmlessly through a small chimney at the
top of the head, or else conducted by a power-transmitting mechanism
to an adjacent musical-box, which would play "Pop Goes the Weasel,"
or something else of a similarly moral tendency. The whole subject
is full of profitable suggestions, which are offered, free of any
expense beyond a small royalty to myself, to the notice of persons of
mechanical genius.
[Illustration: A MERE]
[Illustration: PAIR]
[Illustration: OF PINCERS.]
_Stories from the Diary of a Doctor._
_By the Authors of_ "THE MEDICINE LADY."