"The females" continues our enamoured author, "are wonderfully beautiful, some fair, some brown,--I call them fair, because they are of the colour of fair hair. They have a sort of peak like a widow's upon their beak, which is of a dun colour. No one feather is straggling from the other all over their bodies, they being very careful to adjust themselves, and make them all even with their beaks. The feathers on their thighs are round like shells at the end, and, being there very thick, have an agreeable effect. They have two risings on their crops, and the feathers are whiter there than the rest, which lively represents the fair neck of a beautiful woman. They walk with so much stateliness and good grace, that one cannot help admiring and loving them; by which means their fine mien often saves their lives. Though these birds will sometimes very familiarly come up near enough to one, when we do not run after them, yet they will never grow tame. As soon as they are caught they shed tears without crying, and refuse all manner of meat till they die."--(P. 71.) Their natural food is the fruit of a species of plantain. When these birds are about to build, they select a clean place, and then gather together a quantity of palm-leaves, which they heap up about a foot and a half high, and there they sit. They never lay but one egg, which greatly exceeds that of a goose. Some days after the young one has left the nest, a company of thirty or forty grown-up birds brings another young one to it; and the new-fledged bird, with its father and mother, joining with the band, they all march away to some by-place. "We frequently followed them," says Leguat, "and found that afterwards the old ones went each their way alone, or in couples, and left the two young ones together, and this we called a _marriage_. This particularity has something in it which looks a little fabulous; nevertheless what I say is sincere truth, and what I have more than once observed with care and pleasure."