“It is one of those big birds recently extinct in New Zealand. ‘Moa’ is its common name, so-called because extinct; there is no moa now. See? Well, they have got bones of it, and from some of the marshes even feathers and dried bits of skin. Now, I am going to—well, there is no need to make any bones about it—going to _forge_ a complete stuffed moa. I know a chap out there who will pretend to make the find in a kind of antiseptic swamp, and say he stuffed it at once, as it threatened to fall to pieces. The feathers are peculiar, but I have got a simply lovely way of dodging up singed bits of ostrich plume. Yes, that is the new smell you noticed. They can only discover the fraud with a microscope, and they will hardly care to pull a nice specimen to bits for that. “In this way, you see, I give my little push in the advancement of science. “But all this is merely imitating Nature. I have done more than that in my time. I have—beaten her.” He took his feet down from the mantel-board, and leant over confidentially towards me. “I have _created_ birds,” he said in a low voice. “_New_ birds. Improvements. Like no birds that was ever seen before.” He resumed his attitude during an impressive silence. “Enrich the universe; _rath_-er. Some of the birds I made were new kinds of humming-birds, and very beautiful little things, but some of them were simply rum. The rummest, I think, was the _Anomalopteryx Jejuna_. _Jejunus-a-um_—empty—so-called because there was really nothing in it; a thoroughly empty bird—except for stuffing. Old Javvers has the thing now, and I suppose he is almost as proud of it as I am. It is a masterpiece, Bellows. It has all the silly clumsiness of your pelican, all the solemn want of dignity of your parrot, all the gaunt ungainliness of a flamingo, with all the extravagant chromatic conflict of a mandarin duck. _Such_ a bird. I made it out of the skeletons of a stork and a toucan and a job lot of feathers. Taxidermy of that kind is just pure joy, Bellows, to a real artist in the art.