basins and carry off the lumps that remained. The crow, however, is,
comparatively speaking, a human being; the kite is something alien and a
cause of fear, and the traveller in India never loses him. His eye is as
coldly attentive to Calcutta as to Bombay.

It is, of course, the indigenous birds of a country that emphasise its
foreignness far more than its people. People can travel. Turbaned heads
are, for example, not unknown in England; but to have green parrots with
long tails flitting among the trees, as they used to flit in my host's
garden in Bombay, is to be in India beyond question. At Raisina we had
mynahs and the babblers, or "Seven Sisters," in great profusion, and
also the King Crow with his imposing tail; while the little striped
squirrels were everywhere. These merry restless little rodents do more
than run and scamper and leap: they seem to be positively lifted into
space by their tails. Their stripes (as every one knows) came directly
from the hand of God, recording for ever how, on the day of creation, He
stroked them by way of approval.

No Indian bird gave me so much pleasure to watch as the speckled
kingfishers, which I saw at their best on the Jumna at Okhla. They poise
in the air above the water with their long bills pointed downwards at a
right-angle to their fluttering bodies, searching the depths for their
prey; and then they drop with the quickness of thought into the stream.
The other kingfisher--coloured like ours but bigger--who waits on an
overhanging branch, I saw too, but the evolutions of the hovering
variety were more absorbing.

When one is travelling by road, the birds that most attract the notice
are the peacocks and the giant cranes; while wherever there are cattle
in any numbers there are the white paddy birds, feeding on their backs--