The carrier dove, which is the emblem of peace, though used in these times for carrying war messages, obeys the one governing impulse of its small heart when, released at a distance from its mate and its nest, it turns with marvelous fidelity to its home cote. With no compass except that home-seeking instinct, no reliance except in the exquisitely adjusted beat of its wings, it soars upward until its keen eyesight and quick perceptions give certainty of direction; then, at a splendid pace of 1,400 yards in a minute, it speeds on its journey home. MATED BIRDS THE BEST. Once a male bird has regularly mated he will fly back to his duties as a husband and father as fast as he can. These duties are serious and practical, for the male bird bears his full share in sitting upon the eggs and in feeding the nestlings when hatched, for which purpose both cock and hen possess special faculties and functions. The homing tendency acts best when it is entirely concentrated. For example, it has been found that a mated pair will not fly home together with anything like proper certainty. They stop and dally by the way; they behave like holiday people who have "got somebody to mind the babies." In order to have trustworthy messengers for war or peace the pigeons must not be bachelors nor loafers nor be flown with associates; they must be the respectable mated birds with establishments, so that in employing them for war messengers one actually presses domestic virtue, as well as love and parental instinct, into the service of the military. But even the peaceful pigeon can be sometimes pugnacious on his own account, and a jealous fantail, or tumbler, or Antwerp, or Jacobin often will conduct himself like a game cock, though painters and poets from time immemorial have agreed to regard this bird as the natural emblem of gentleness and peace. It is the accepted token of the Holy Spirit, "which descended in the form of a dove." All literatures are full of this thought. PIGEONS IN LEGEND AND STORY. The Arabs have a story that when an angel of Allah offered to King Solomon the water of immortality in a ruby cup it was a dove that dissuaded him from drinking it, and thereby from living mournfully to survive those whom he loved in an earth grown desolate and lonely. And it was because of the maternal courage of a dove which had followed its captive nestlings all the way to the prophet's house that Mohammed instituted that merciful decree which still prevails all over the East, and which forbids true believers to touch or even to taste of the flesh of any creature which has not been "hallalled"; that is to say, over which, while alive, the prayer of pardonable bloodshed has not been uttered.