He also saw a party of twenty or thirty males dancing on the branches of huge trees, raising their wings, stretching out their necks and elevating their plumes all for the purpose of admiring themselves or being admired. Some of them have finer plumage than I, but only the KINGBIRDS OF PARADISE have those two dear little rings which you see in my picture. [Illustration: From col. Mr. F. Kaempfer. KINGBIRD OF PARADISE. 3/4 Life-size. Copyright by Nature Study Pub. Co., 1898. Chicago.] The sublime is no nearer the ridiculous in literature than in the things of nature. An instance of this is the close relation of the common Crow to the most glorious bird of them all. Not only are they very much alike in general form, including shape of feet, bill, bones, and ordinary feathering, but also in habit. They seem to delight in the same sorts of food and secure it in much the same manner. When they are happiest and attempt to pour forth their songs of joy the voice of the Crow is fully as melodious and satisfactory to the human ear as is that of the Bird of Paradise. The old fable in regard to their having no feet and living only on the dews of heaven and the delicacies which they were supposed to be able to collect from the atmosphere as they floated perpetually free from the earth and its contaminations was so grateful to Europeans that when Antony Pigafetta, who accompanied Magellan around the world and secured a great deal of information at first hand, described them as birds with very ordinary, in fact, almost ugly, feet and legs, he was not believed, and Aldrovandus publicly brought accusations against him for audacious falsehood. While the males have not only a splendid growth of delicate floating feathers of very unusual length and glossy fineness of texture, the females have but little more to boast of than our American Crow, and they even lack the degree of lustre which our black friend frequently exhibits. But the males are adorned with a wealth of color display, rich in velvety softness and blazing with metallic lustre. This lustre cannot be appreciated from the appearance of the faded specimens so often seen in the museums which may have suffered, not alone from dust and exposure for years to the chemical action of light but have also been sadly diminished in glory by the rude arts of the natives who fumigate the skins with burning sulphur, their principal care seeming to be to get enough of it deposited to make sure of the skins' not being attacked by insects.