n to be the
victim of our Christmas merry-making. I repeat with her the method of
manipulation which I employed so successfully on the banks of the
Aveyron. I tuck her head well under her wing and, molding it in this
attitude with both hands, I rock the bird gently up and down for a
couple of minutes.

The strange effect is produced; my childhood's manoeuvres obtained no
better result. Laid on the ground, on her side and left to herself, my
patient is a lifeless bundle. One would think her dead, if a slight
rise and fall of the plumage did not reveal the breathing. She looks
really like a dead bird which, in a last convulsion, had drawn its
chilled feet, with their shrivelled toes, under its belly. The
spectacle has a tragic air; and I feel overcome by a certain anxiety
when I gaze upon the results of my evil spells. Poor Turkey! What if
she were never to wake again!

We need not be afraid: she is waking; she stands up, staggering a
little, it is true, with drooping tail and a shamefaced expression.
That soon passes off; not a trace of it remains. In a few moments the
bird is once more what it was before the experiment.

This torpor, the mean between true sleep and death, is of variable
duration. When repeatedly provoked in my Turkey-hen, with suitable
intervals of repose, immobility lasts sometimes for half an hour and
sometimes for a few minutes. Here, as in the insect, it would be very
difficult to analyse the causes of these differences. With the
Guinea-fowl I succeed even better. The torpor lasts so long that I
become alarmed by the bird's condition. The plumage reveals no trace
of breathing. I ask myself, anxiously, whether the bird is not
actually dead. I push it a little way along the ground with my foot.
The patient does not stir. I do it again. And lo, the Guinea-fowl
frees her head, stands up, regains her balance and scurries off! Her
state of lethargy has lasted more than half an hour.

Now for the Goose. I have none. The gardener next door trusts me with
his. She is brought to my house, which she fills with her trumpeting
as she waddles about. Shortly afterwards there is absolute silence:
the web-footed Amazon is lying on the ground, with her head tucked
under her wing. Her immobility is as profound and as prolonged as that
of the Turkey and the Guinea-fowl.

It is the Hen's turn now and the Duck's. They too succumb, but, so it
seems to me, less persistently. Can it be that my hypnotic tricks are
les