nd it is somewhat startling, and also
destructive of our most cherished ideas, to say that it seems a case of
mistaken identity almost from beginning to end. It cannot be the eagle,
_our_ eagle, that is meant. He has never in a single instance done
anything to entitle him to a medal. Yet the idealism of the ages has
been heaping honors on his crested head through the necessity, as yet
unexplained, of having some winged creature to glorify, to use as an
emblem, to paint, to describe incorrectly if poetically, to embellish a
heroic national moral with. It has been done without regard to fact in
all the school-readers and other truthful volumes intended for the use
of the very young. Every boy regards the American Eagle as the king of
birds even from a moral standpoint, and he is liable to at least a brief
spell of disappointment if he has the faculty of observation and the
love of nature sufficiently developed to find out by-and-by that he has
been deceived.

The coparcener with the eagle in all this beautiful nonsense is a bird
that never existed at all, and who, having at last fallen from her high
estate, is now principally useful as a name for a hotel that has been
too often burned, or as the escutcheon of an insurance company.
Considered in a matter-of-fact way, and in the cold and unflattering
light of natural history, our national emblem is no more a truth than
the Phoenix is, and is almost as preposterous as the roc. One wonders
why, in the course of so many ages in which the gradual drift has been
toward common-sense and fact, men have not learned to turn for their
animal ideals, if it is necessary to have them, to the beasts and birds
entitled to some consideration for actual qualities; for both beauty and
gallantry, for instance, to the male of the barn yard fowl; for
devotion, to the grotesquely homely stork; for self-sacrifice, to any of
the beautiful creatures who flutter along before you in the path, with
the distressful pantomime of a broken wing and great distress, inviting
you to kill them easily with a stick or stone if you have the heart, and
offering you every inducement to pursue them that is latent in man's
cruel heart, but only after all to lead the marauder further and further
away from a nest that is cherished.

As to the first of these hastily-given examples, any country-raised boy
will concede the point, and he has not been left entirely out in the
poetry, and especially in the folk-lore, of th