Miss Selwyn had never heard of the vast flock of doves which dwell in security among the towering buildings of the city. Their wings flash across wide darkling streets all day, welcome to every careworn man who watches, for a moment, their graceful flight. They were here before her now--there, parading strutting, looking up hopefully toward the men about them, each eagerly seeking the next flip of the corn. They were--and are to-day--because of some gracious instinct in humanity, the best casual street exemplification of what is best in human nature. They dripped and dropped from somewhere almost simultaneously. There was one who strutted the most struttingly and whose only really justifiable claim was that from crown to midway of his body he had such iridescent purple as all the shell-opening fishermen of Tyre and Sidon never devised half-way. There was another one, a quaint little maiden, who will probably marry some English nobleman of the birds, snow-white, with strange geometrical lines crisscross about her back, and who was almost duplicated by a dozen or two others of her breed. There were two rufous things, the red of whose top and back lapsed into a white beneath, almost as exquisitely as blends the splendid red hair of a woman into the ever accompanying white of the skin beneath. There were little drizzled things, pert, like bantams, off-breeds which had introduced themselves into the community. And there was nothing but just a tossing about among those beautiful creatures upon the pavement there, nothing but an Oliver Twistish clamor for "more" from those who stood above them, to whom they were doing more good than they could know. On week days the pigeons fly out in foraging parties to the railway yards and the neighborhood of the huge grain elevators. They can be seen glancing above the tall buildings, far flying, specks of gleaming light, along the hollow spaces above the streets as they go and come from their feeding places. The crowded masses of wagons, street cars, carriages, horses and hurrying people keep the pigeons from the street where they are most at home together for six days. But on the seventh, when the burden of labor is lifted or a brief space from the shoulders of toiling mankind, the pigeons rally in force upon one of the most busy, prosaic, care-breeding corners in the great spreading city by the lake. And every Sunday come, as surely, men and boys to feed the air-travelers and look at them with the worship all men feel for natural beauty and grace. [Illustration: "HE WAS UNCONSCIOUS AS A CHILD"]