But the admiration, the delight, and the desire are equally great, and
the loss just as keenly felt, whether the strange species seen happens
to be one surpassingly beautiful or not. Its newness is to the
naturalist its greatest attraction. How beautiful beyond all others
seems a certain small unnamed brown bird to my mind! So many years have
passed and its image has not yet grown dim; yet I saw it only for a few
moments, when it hopped out from, the thick foliage and perched within
two or three yards of me, not afraid, but only curious; and after
peering at me first with one eye and then the other, and wiping its
small dagger on a twig, it flew away and was seen no more. For many days
I sought for it, and for years waited its reappearance, and it was more
to me than ninety and nine birds which I had always known; yet it was
very modest, dressed in a brown suit, very pale on the breast and white
on the throat, and for distinction a straw-coloured stripe over the
eye--that ribbon which Queen Nature bestows on so many of her feathered
subjects, in recognition, I suppose, of some small and common kind of
merit. If I should meet with it in a collection I should know it again;
only, in that case it would look plain and homely to me--this little
bird that for a time made all others seem unbeautiful.
Even a richer prize may come in sight for a brief period--one of the
nobler mammalians, which are fewer in number, and bound to earth like
ourselves, and therefore so much better known than the wandering
children of air.
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