[Illustration: TRY BREAKFAST.] [Illustration: OH, I CAN'T!] [Illustration: WELL, HERE GOES] [Illustration: OH!] [Illustration: NO.] [Illustration: I CAN'T--] [Illustration: TOUCH ANOTHER.] [Illustration: UGH!] Perhaps the most dissipated-looking creature in the animal kingdom is a toucan during a bad moult. You long to give him a gallon of soda-water and a temperance tract. He sleeps much (a toucan always sleeps with his beak over his shoulder and covered by his wing--he doesn't mean to have that nose stolen)--he sleeps as much as possible, and wakes as seedy as one can imagine. He can scarcely drag his beak off his back without banging it on his perch, and considers the question of breakfast with a shudder. With many blinks he strives desperately to pull himself together--to pull together a handful of loose quills and a beak. They give him grapes; it is a mockery. Who can eat grapes with such a head? He may struggle with a grape perhaps for a few seconds, but breakfast beats him in the end, and he retires to a repentant corner. What a night it must have been! [Illustration: A LITTLE HORSEY] Out of his moult, however, and in good feather, the toucan is rather a fine bird, so long as you forget his nose. The Ariel toucan here--with the black beak--is a little horsey in aspect--a very little--but quite neat and gentlemanly. Not such a real old crusted Tory-club-window gentleman as the Triton cockatoo, but still a gentleman. As for the green-billed toucan, she can never be anything but a good-natured Jewess in her most gorgeous Shabbos clothes. [Illustration: "VELL RACHAEL!"] The comparative quietness of the toucans in house number 54-55 is, probably, due to a worse thing--the noise of the parrots and cockatoos; the house can hold no more noise, and the toucans altogether despair of ever making themselves heard. Why the windows are so rarely broken I can scarcely understand, except on the hypothesis of a suspension of natural laws for the benefit of natural science and its institutions. The keeper says he doesn't mind the noise--to such torture may human nature be accommodated by long habit. Saint Cecilia would have become accustomed to boiling if she had had forty years of it. The other saint (male, but I forget which) who was grilled could never have done without his hot gridiron if he had been able to keep on it for forty years, the time this keeper has been among these parrots. Personally, I should expect to become reconciled to boiling, grilling, or any other class of plain cookery, in about half the time that would elapse before a few hundred competitive parrot-yells began to feel soothing to the nerves.