innocent cause of my decorative folly. I began to look over my accounts,
to study my check books, to do some big sums in addition, and it made me
even more depressed. Result of these mental exercises as follows: Rent,
$40 per year; incidental expenses to date, $5,713.85. Was there any good
in this silly investment of mine? Well, if it came to the very worst, I
could kill the couple and have a rare dish. Yet Horace did not think its
flesh equal to an ordinary chicken. He wrote:

I shall ne'er prevail
To make our men of taste a pullet choose,
And the gay peacock with its train refuse.
For the rare bird at mighty price is sold,
And lo! What wonders from its tail unfold!
But can these whims a higher gusto raise
Unless you eat the plumage that you praise?
Or do its glories when 'tis boiled remain?
No; 'tis the unequaled beauty of its train,
Deludes your eye and charms you to the feast,
For hens and peacocks are alike in taste.

Then peacocks have been made useful in a medicinal way. The doctors once
prescribed peacock broth for pleurisy, peacocks' tongues for epilepsy,
peacocks' fat for colic, peacocks' galls for weak eyes, peahens' eggs
for gout.

It is always darkest just before dawn, and only a week from that
humiliating Sunday episode I was called by my gardener to look at the
dearest little brown something that was darting about in the poultry
yard. It was a baby peacock, only one day old. He got out of the nest in
some way, and preferred to take care of himself. How independent, how