“I said that I hoped so, as I had not seen anything to laugh at since we started out from the hotel. When we got inside we looked around for the man who had been making the noise, but there was nobody visible except a very solemn-faced keeper, who did not look as if he had laughed for a month.
“I remarked to Ned that the old fellow had put on a serious face now because company had come in, to which Ned nodded assent. Just as he did so the laughing began again, and it was such a funny laugh that both of us joined in it.
“The old fellow’s face did not move a muscle, and we saw that he was not the humorous one of the place. We looked in the direction of the laughter and saw that it came, not from a man, but from a bird. In spite of our astonishment we burst out laughing, and the doctor and our host joined us in doing so.
“Our host then explained that the bird which was amusing us was known as the ‘laughing jackass.’ We had heard of the creature before, but this was our first view of him. We took a good look, and while we were doing so he laughed again, right in our faces. The laugh is almost exactly like that of a human being. It is not musical but is very comical, and, somehow, it has a tendency to set everybody laughing who is within sound of it.
“The bird is about the size of a full-grown pigeon, perhaps a little larger. He is not handsomely proportioned, his head being too large for his body and his tail very small. His feathers are white and black, and he has a comical appearance that harmonizes well with his humorous manner. He is easily domesticated, and will learn to talk quite as readily as the parrot does.
“The laughing jackass is a friend of the bushman, as he foretells wet weather. When the air is dry and clear, he is a very lively bird, and fills the air with the sound of his laughter; but if rain is coming, or especially if it has come, he is the very picture of misery and unhappiness. He mopes on his perch, whether it be in a cage, or on the limb of a tree, or in the open air, with his feathers ruffled, and a very bedraggled appearance, like a hen that has been caught in a shower. In the forest he will imitate the sound of an axe cutting at a tree, and many a man has been deceived into walking a mile or more in the expectation of finding somebody at work.
“The bird belongs to the kingfisher family, but does not hunt much for fishes, his favorite food being snakes. It makes no difference to him whether the snakes are poisonous or not, as his attacks upon them are limited only by their size. Large snakes he cannot handle, but small ones are his delight. He drops down upon them with the quickness of a flash, seizes them just back of the head, and then flies up in the air a hundred feet to drop them upon the hardest piece of ground he can find.
“The fall breaks their backs, and he keeps up this performance until life is extinct, when he devours his prey. His services as a snake-killer are known all over the country, and consequently he is never shot or trapped. He is intelligent enough to understand his immunity from attack, and comes fearlessly about the houses of the people in the country districts.
“Speaking of snakes reminds me that they have a very good collection in the Zoo. We asked the keeper to indicate to us the snakes peculiar to Australia, and he did so. The largest of them is known as the carpet snake, and the specimen that we saw was about ten feet long. It belongs to the constrictor family, being perfectly harmless so far as its bite is concerned, but it has powers of constriction that might be very serious to the person around whom the creature has wound itself. One traveler in Australia tells how he was visiting a cattle station in Queensland, and when he went to bed the first night of his stay, he found a carpet snake lying on the outside of his couch. He called loudly for some one to come and kill the serpent.
“His call was heard by the proprietor, who shouted to him not to kill the snake, as it was one of the family pets, and then the man came and seized the creature by the neck and carried it to a barrel where he said the snake belonged. I hope they won’t have any pets of that sort around any house that I visit during my stay in Australia.