“How did I come to make it?  Simple enough, as all great inventions are.  One of those young genii who write us Science Notes in the papers got hold of a German pamphlet about the birds of New Zealand, and translated some of it by means of a dictionary and his mother-wit—­he must have been one of a very large family with a small mother—­and he got mixed between the living apteryx and the extinct anomalopteryx; talked about a bird five feet high, living in the jungles of the North Island, rare, shy, specimens difficult to obtain, and so on.  Javvers, who even for a collector, is a miraculously ignorant man, read these paragraphs, and swore he would have the thing at any price.  Raided the dealers with enquiries.  It shows what a man can do by persistence—­will-power.  Here was a bird-collector swearing he would have a specimen of a bird that did not exist, that never had existed, and which for very shame of its own profane ungainliness, probably would not exist now if it could help itself.  And he got it. He got it.”

“Have some more whisky, Bellows?” said the taxidermist, rousing himself from a transient contemplation of the mysteries of will-power and the collecting turn of mind.  And, replenished, he proceeded to tell me of how he concocted a most attractive mermaid, and how an itinerant preacher, who could not get an audience because of it, smashed it because it was idolatry, or worse, at Burslem Wakes.  But as the conversation of all the parties to this transaction, creator, would-be preserver, and destroyer, was uniformly unfit for publication, this cheerful incident must still remain unprinted.

The reader unacquainted with the dark ways of the collector may perhaps be inclined to doubt my taxidermist, but so far as great auks’ eggs, and the bogus stuffed birds are concerned, I find that he has the confirmation of distinguished ornithological writers.  And the note about the New Zealand bird certainly appeared in a morning paper of unblemished reputation, for the Taxidermist keeps a copy and has shown it to me.

A DEAL IN OSTRICHES

“Talking of the prices of birds, I’ve seen an ostrich that cost three hundred pounds,” said the Taxidermist, recalling his youth of travel.  “Three hundred pounds!”

He looked at me over his spectacles.  “I’ve seen another that was refused at four.”

“No,” he said, “it wasn’t any fancy points.  They was just plain ostriches.  A little off colour, too—­owing to dietary.  And there wasn’t any particular restriction of the demand either.  You’d have thought five ostriches would have ruled cheap on an East Indiaman.  But the point was, one of ’em had swallowed a diamond.