THERE is an odd kind of fascination about breeding
Brahmas that we have not felt with regard to other
fowls. Not that the young birds are handsome — far from it :
it is the very reverse fact that adds the charm ; the chicks,
especially the cockerels, being so unconscionably ugly at
a certain age that they seem made for scarecrows and
nothing else. As therefore their hidden beauties begin
late and slowly to develope themselves, being visible to the
experienced eye weeks or months ere the casual spectator
can discern anything but the "lean plucked chickens"
Burnham so graphically describes, there is a pleasing excite-
ment about the business difficult to describe, but by no
means hard to understand. You stand in your yard, and
looking at your biggest cockerel, mentally pronounce him
the very ugliest wretch you ever saw in your life — but —
you don't know what he may be ! Week by week you
watch his great body settle down lower on his long legs : his
wing feathers, once in such hopeless disorder, you get right
after awhile with infinite pains; and when at last that tail
which seemed as if it never would grow begins to develope,
and the bird slowly acquires his adult plumage and gets into
condition, your hopes rise high as you see that he is " quite



92 The Brahma Fowl. [Chap. IV.
