operations he must become a nursing mother to the young progeny who can by no means walk about and get his living in his earliest days. The little chickens in our farm yards seem to take the world very easily; but they have their mother's wings, and we as yet hardly know all the assistance which is thus given to them. But the ostrich farmer must know enough to keep his young ones alive, or he will soon be ruined,—for each bird when hatched is supposed to be worth £10. The ostrich farmer must take upon himself all the functions of the ostrich mother, and must know all that instinct has taught her, or he will hardly be successful.
The birds are plucked before they are a year old, and I think that no one as yet knows the limit of age to which they will live and be plucked. I saw birds which had been plucked for sixteen years and were still in high feather. When the plucking time has come the necessary number of birds are enticed by a liberal display of mealies,—as maize or Indian corn is called in South Africa,—into a pen one side of which is moveable. The birds will go willingly after mealies, and will run about their paddocks after any one they see, in the expectation of these delicacies. When the pen is full the moveable side is run in, so that the birds are compressed together beyond the power of violent struggling. They cannot spread their wings or make the dart forward which is customary to them when about to kick. Then men go in among them, and taking up their wings pluck or cut their feathers. Both processes are common but the former I think is most so, as being the more
