set of ancestors! Good breeding prevailed even amongst the smallest of them, and needless to add Hira took his defeat like a gentleman. By now January had come, with cool weather and clear skies and the competition for pigeon prizes began. Each man's flock was tested on three points: namely, team-work, long distance flight, and flight under danger. We won the first prize on the first point, but I am sorry to say that owing to a sad mishap which you shall learn of in its proper place, my pigeons could not compete for the other two. This is the nature of the team-work competition. The various flocks of pigeons fly away up from their respective homes. Once they are beyond the reach of whistling and other sounds that indicate their master's voice, the diverse flocks coalesce. Then spontaneously they agree to fly under the leadership of a pigeon whom they consider fit. All that happens up in the air where pigeon-wit and pigeon instinct prevail, and the bird who flies forward and is allowed to lead, does so without ever realizing the nature and the reason of the honour that has been bestowed on him. The temperature dropped to forty-five. It was a fine cold morning for our part of India, in fact the coldest day of the year. The sky above, as usual in the winter, was cloudless and remote, a sapphire intangibility. The city houses--rose, blue, white, and yellow--looked like an army of giants rising from the many-coloured abyss of dawn. Far off the horizons burnt in a haze of dun and purple. Men and women in robes of amber and amethyst, after having said their morning prayers to God, were raising their arms from the house-tops in gestures of benediction to the rising sun. City noises and odours were unleashed from their kennels of the night. Kites and crows were filling the air with their cries. Over the din and clamour one could yet hear the song of the flute players. At that moment the signal whistle blew that the contest had begun, and each pigeon fancier waved from his roof a white flag. Instantly from nowhere innumerable flocks of pigeons rose into the sky. Flock upon flock, colour upon colour, their fluttering wings bore them above the city. Crows and kites--the latter of two species, red and brown--fled from the sky before the thundering onrush of tens of thousands of carriers and tumblers. Soon all the flocks--each flying in the shape of a fan--circled in the sky like so many clouds caught in large whirlpools of air. Though each moment they ascended higher, for a long time each owner of a flock knew his own from the others, and even when at last the separate flocks merged into one single unit and flew like a solid wall of wings, I could pick out by the way they flew, Gay-Neck, Hira, Jahore and half a dozen others. Each bird had personal characteristics that marked him as he flew. When any owner wished to call the attention of any one of his pigeons, he blew a shrill whistle with certain stops as a signal. That attracted the bird's attention