I had begun to read and inquire about pigeons, and knew there were many fancy breeds—fantails, pouters with long necks and globular crops, jacobins with their big hoods, snake-like magpies, short-faced tumblers and long-faced tumblers, tipplers, dragoons, swallows, owls, and many other kinds, but I did not know what the prices ought to be.
If these birds were trained homers, or working homers, as they are called, they would be worth more than one dollar and seventy-five cents. However, the auctioneer could not assure me of this, so I paid him the money, and sent the birds home.
It was touching to see the pleasure they took in getting out of their cage. They ate and drank and bathed and ran their pink tongues over the lumps of rock-salt I kept about. Nearly every bird I had, even canaries, would peck eagerly at this salt, though caged canaries would die if fed salt.
These two pigeons flew to the roof-veranda, and as soon as I discovered their preferred corner I gave them a box in it. There they laid not two but four eggs, and sat on them, one relieving the other, after the usual intervals. I was very proud and very boastful, until after I had a call from my friend the pigeon-fancier, who laughed heartily at my two birds.
“They are females,” he said, “a pair only lays two eggs for a nest.” This threw some light on the strange actions of the Englishman. The birds had probably laid four eggs in their traveling-cage, and in disgust at finding that he had two females sold to him instead of a pair that would have enabled him to raise young ones, he had decided not to give them a further trip of a few thousand miles.
The fancier exchanged one of them for me, and I got a fine blue homer, who took kindly to my gray one, and soon raised a number of healthy, handsome birds. I became very fond of these homers, and on learning something of the history of their kind, soon surveyed them with feelings of mingled admiration and respect.
They are our best and most wonderful birds, and they were our first, for did not one of them perform the first messenger service on record in carrying the sprig of green to the waiting Noah in the ark?
The dove was the ancestor of the carrier—and the smerle and the cumulet and the carrier were the ancestors of the homer, and yet even to-day there are persons who do not know what a remarkable part pigeons play in times of peace, in times of war, and in times of love.
Ever since the days of Noah this chunky, round-headed, clear-sighted, faithful, intelligent little creature has been the hard-working servant of many nations. The Romans used him in war-time for conveying messages from the armies, and an old song tells us of a warrior wounded in battle sending an outpouring of his heart to his lady-love by means of a carrier pigeon:
Fly away to my native land, sweet bird,