sight of each other, with many orders,
tribes, and families between. Under my title they are gathered amicably
together in the common possession of very long bills, like two tailors
on a man's doorstep. The word is derived, in the proper and regular
manner, from ancient sources; from _conk_, a venerable Eastern word,
signifying a nose or beak, and the Latin _avis_, a bird. And I offer
the term freely as my humble, but I trust useful, contribution to
science; my first contribution.

The stork is regarded, in many countries, with a certain
semi-superstitious reverence and esteem. After many prolonged and
serious attempts to saturate myself with a similar feeling, I regret to
confess to a certain smallness of esteem for the stork. You can't esteem
a bird that makes ugly digs at your feet and heels with such a very big
beak. Out in their summer quarters the storks are kept in by close wire,
and close wire will give an air of inoffensiveness to most things. But,
away in a by-yard, with a gate marked "private," there stands a shed
wherein the storks are kept warm in winter, behind wooden bars; and
between these bars stork-heads have a way of dropping at the toes of the
favoured passer-by, like to action of a row of roadmen's picks.

[Illustration: PICKS AND CHEWS.]

The stork has come off well in the matter of bodily endowment. The
pelican has a tremendous beak--achieved, it would seem, by a skimping of
material in the legs; but the stork has the tremendous beak and legs of
surprising growth as well. His wings, too, are something more than
respectable. At flying, at eating, at portentous solemnity of
demeanour--in all these and in other things the pelican and the stork
score fairly evenly; but at walking the pelican is left behind at once.
This makes one suspect the stork's honesty. The pelican has a good beak
and wings, and pays for them, like an honest bird, out of its legs, just
as the ostrich pays for its neck and legs out of its wings. But the
stork is abnormally lucky in beak, neck, legs, and wings together, and
even then has material left to lay out in superfluous knobs and wens to
hang round its neck, which leads to a suspicion that many of its
personal fittings belong properly to some other bird. I've a notion that
the unlucky kiwi might identify some of the property.

[Illustration: THE PELICAN LEFT.]

[Illustration: ARMY.]

Perhaps the adjutant should be acknowledged king of the conkavians.
Billy, the Zoo ad