Fig. 1.
I have been spending a portion of this autumn at the house of some old friends in the country. They are not exactly farmers, but they own a farm, so there were lots of cream and new milk, and fresh eggs and poultry, and red apples and nuts, and such country luxuries. I was paying them a long-promised visit with my wife, my two daughters, and my son. My friend's family consisted of himself, his wife, their son aged twenty, their daughter and her two children. Well, you see this made a pretty good party to start with. There were five of us and six of them—five and six are eleven.
Well, one evening we were seated round the table trying to amuse ourselves with dominoes, wiggles, and such things, when in came the young minister—a nice, amiable gentleman, whose cravat was generally twisted round to the back of his neck, but who reminded you somehow of a host of gentle characters in Dickens and Thackeray: Traddles, Dobbin, Toots, Mr. Dick, the Pale Young Gentleman (in Great Expectations), Tom Pinch, and several others. Not that he was precisely like either of them, but there was an air about him which reminded you of some pleasant book. Well, he came in and chatted a little while, when another ring was heard at the door, and a party of neighbors announced themselves, all fresh and frosty, viz., two Misses Larkin, two boy cousins, and two young gentlemen visitors from the city. Now, indeed, we had a party—eighteen in all.
Fig. 2.
First we talked, then we asked some riddles, then we played games—the Bachelor's Kitchen and such like. Then there was a pause; perceiving which, one of the young men from the city whispered to one of the boy cousins, he whispered to the daughter, and they all slipped out of the room. Conversation was resumed. Presently the door was thrown open, and in hopped the queerest-looking bird that any one ever saw out of a nightmare.
Fig. 3.
"This," said the young man from the city, "is the celebrated adjutant bird of the East Indies. This bird is to be seen familiarly walking about the streets of Calcutta, where he is, in fact, the Street-cleaning Bureau, Board of Health, and Captain Williams all combined. There are no ash barrels there, no garbage carts, no nothing; he gobbles up everything himself. He will swallow a leg of mutton at one gulp, and as for tomato cans, they are like strawberries to him. He can impale a man on his strong bill, and has done it before now—"