Many years ago I read a delightful poem called _The Paradise of Birds_--I
believe it was by Mortimer Collins,[1] but I am not sure. Now the Poet
(who, together with Windbag, sailed to this very paradise of birds) deemed
that this happy asylum of the feathered fowls was somewhere at the back of
the North Pole. He cannot have known of Kashmir, or he would assuredly
have sent the persecuted birds thither, and placed the "Roc's Egg" as
janitor, somewhere by the portals of the Jhelum Valley. Kashmir is truly
and indeed the paradise of birds, for there no man molests them, and no
schoolboy collects eggs, and the result is a fascinating fearlessness, the
result of perpetual peace and plenty.
I regret exceedingly that my ornithological knowledge is extremely limited.
I could find no books to help me,[2] and, as I did not care to kill any
birds merely to enable me to identify their species, my notes were merely
"popular" and not "scientific."
Shall I confess that I began an erudite work on the birds of Kashmir, but
got no further than the Hoopoe? It began as follows:--
THE HOOPOE
_Early history of_.--Tereus, King of Thrace, annoyed his wife Procne so
much by the very marked attention which he paid to her sister Philomela,
that she lost her temper so far as to chop up her son Itylus, and present
him to his papa in the form of a ragout.
This, naturally, disgusted Tereus very much, and he "fell upon" the ladies
with a sword, but, just as he was about to stab them to the heart, he was
changed into a Hoopoe, Philomela into a nightingale, Procne into a swallow,
while Itylus became a pheasant.
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