Crossing over to the big case on the other side, we see another cliff, bare and gray, and covered with white birds--geese and gulls of many different sorts. This is a copy of a bit of a famous rock off the coast of Scotland called the Bass Rock, which rises out of the sea like an enormous stone many hundreds of feet high. At the times of the year when birds make their nests it is white with wild sea-birds, and the nests are laid along the crevices and shelves of the bare rock, so near together that the birds can easily touch one another while they are sitting on them. If anyone fired a gun near the rock there would be a sudden flight up into the air of hundreds of birds all at once, like a gigantic cloud, flying, whirling, screaming, mixed up together, rising higher and higher in great circles till you would feel stunned and deafened and almost frightened, as if a piece of the sky had suddenly taken shape and broken up over your head. These wild birds know they are safe on the Bass Rock, and they take no care to protect their nests; no one could climb up those sheer precipices and steal the eggs. The birds sit there safely, looking down upon such heights as would make you giddy even to see; and in front the blue sea stretches for miles. It is a wild, free life. Going back down the room, there may be time to notice the cases on the sides of the partitions full of stuffed birds, many very beautiful, but not so interesting as those that are shown with their nests and young ones. Quite near the door is a case with some large birds as tall as a child of seven in it. They are cassowaries, with drooping dark-brown feathers that look rather out of curl, and necks of crimson and blue. Further on there is a family of ostriches, the great father bird very grand and with a black coat, and magnificent white tail-feathers--those feathers that ladies buy for their hats, and for which they give so much money. Ostriches are kept on farms in South Africa, and their tail-feathers are pulled out at certain seasons of the year; and then they grow, again and are soon ready to be pulled out again, and people make much money this way. I do not know how much pain this gives the ostrich, but it cannot be pleasant; and perhaps he wishes sometimes he was not quite so grand, but was dressed in a plain dull-brown suit trimmed with dirty white like his humble wife. The ostrich is very savage, and can never be depended on; he may turn upon the keeper who has fed him and cared for him for years, and, seizing him, kick him with his great feet until he is stunned, or dance upon him for no reason at all. He does not look safe; his narrow flat head and cruel eyes would make you think he was a tyrant. The little ones running about at his feet look so ridiculously small in comparison that you would hardly think they could be his children; but in time they, too, will grow big like papa and have splendid tails, and lord it over their poor wives.