Our Gay-Neck was a tremendous eater. He kept one of his parents busy getting food while the other brooded or stayed with him. I think the father bird brooded and worked for him no less hard than the mother. No wonder his body grew very fat. His carnation color changed into a yellowish white--the first sign of feathers coming on. Then that gave way to prickly white feathers, round and somewhat stiff like a porcupine needle. The yellow things that hung about his mouth and eyes fell away. Slowly the beak emerged, firm, sharp and long. What a powerful jaw! When he was about three weeks old an ant was crawling past him into the pigeon hole at whose entrance he was sitting. Without any instruction from anybody he struck it with his beak. Where there had been a whole ant, now lay its two halves. He brought his nose down to the dead ant and examined what he had done. There was no doubt that he had taken that black ant for a seed and killed an innocent passer-by who was friendly to his race. Let us hope he was ashamed of it. Anyway, he never killed another ant the rest of his life. By the time he was five weeks old he could hop out of his birth-nest and take a drink from the pan of water left near the pigeon holes. Even now he had to be fed by his parents, though every day he tried to get food on his own account. He would sit on my wrist and dig up a seed at a time from the palm of my hand. He juggled it two or three times in his throat like a juggler throwing up balls in the air, and swallowed it. Every time Gay-Neck did that, he turned his head and looked into my eyes as much as to say: "Am I not doing it well? You must tell my parents how clever I am when they come down from sunning themselves on the roof." All the same, he was the slowest of my pigeons in developing his powers. Just at this time I made a discovery. I never knew before how pigeons could fly in a dust storm without going blind. But as I watched the ever growing Gay-Neck I noticed one day that a film was drawn over his eyes. I thought he was losing his sight. In my consternation I put forth my hand to draw him nearer to my face in order to examine him closely. No sooner had I made the gesture than he opened his golden eyes and receded into the rear of the hole. But just the same I caught and took him up on the roof, and in the burning sunlight of May I scrutinized his eye-lids. Yes, there it was: he had, attached to his eyelid, another thin lid delicate as tissue paper, and every time I put his face toward the sun he drew that film over the two orbits of gold. And so I learned that it was a protective film for the eye which enabled the bird to fly in a dust storm or straight toward the sun.