The Natural History Museum at South Kensington is a large building, and it is newer than the British Museum and not so gloomy. It is built of different sorts of yellow brick, and has tall towers, and stands among well-kept green lawns. When you go into the hall you see long galleries stretching out on each side. In one there are most beautifully stuffed birds of every sort you could name, and a great many you could not name. All of these are set up in glass cases, with the flowers and grass or bushes round that the birds choose to make their nests in when they are alive. We can see here all the different ways that birds take to hide their nests and young ones. Poor birds! they have so many enemies—the weasel, who sucks their eggs; the cat, who loves to eat their young ones; the birds larger than themselves, who prey upon them; and last, but not least, the cruel boys who destroy the nests 'for fun,' and a poor sort of fun it is.

There are two ways birds hide their nests: one by really hiding them—that is to say, building them under a deep bank or in the thickest part of a tree—and the other by making them so like their surroundings that it is difficult to see them at all. You all know instances of the first way; the second is not so common. But perhaps the commonest is the plover, who just brings together a few straws on the mud of a field and lays her eggs there without any protection; yet the eggs are so like the mud-coloured surroundings that you might hunt for a long time, and even walk over them without seeing them.

Down the middle of the room at the Museum are the more common British birds, and we will look at one or two. But it is quite impossible to talk about all of them, or we should still be talking when the keeper of the Museum came to turn everyone out and shut up the building for the night.

Look first at this pretty clump of grass, with a bramble trailing over it and a bunch of primroses growing near. You would hardly have found the nest, so well hidden, unless you had known it must be there. It is a robin's, and the mother is bringing a caterpillar for her little family. Which of the three gaping yellow mouths will get the delicious morsel? Quite near is a wren's nest in some ivy, and so neatly is the nest made of moss woven together that there is only one tiny little hole left for the heads of the little wrens to peep out. The perky little father, with his tail cocked up, stands near. He is very shy and jealous, and so is his mate; if you put just the tip of your finger on the edge of a wren's nest the birds would desert at once, leaving the wretched young ones to starve. The little brown bird in the next case is the nightingale, who sings so sweetly; he is not much to look at, yet he has a picturesque home, with meadow-sweet and wild roses growing over it.

It is odd how many birds build on or near the ground, which you would think was dangerous. The robin is particularly fond of this; it chooses an overhanging bank if it can find one, and though the nest is well hidden, there is nearly always a cat prowling near to seize the young ones just when their first feathers are growing, so it seems wonderful that robins ever escape at all. On the left side is the wood-wren, with a nest just like a handful of hay flung down among some dead leaves. Near here, too, are the house-martins, and further on the swallows and other birds, who build under the projecting eaves of houses; of all the nests, these look the most safe and cosy. The house-martin is a really clever builder; he takes little mouthfuls of clay in his beak and sticks them one by one under the deep overhanging tiles or slates of a house or barn, and gradually forms a complete nest like a ball of clay, which dries hard, and is stuck against the wall, with only one opening like a lip at the top. The nest does not look comfortable, but it is, for inside it is lined with the softest white feathers, whereon are laid the pearly-white eggs. The sand-martin, the house-martin's cousin, prefers the side of a cliff. He digs into a cliff or sandbank a long tunnel quite as long as your arm, and just big enough for him to pop in and out with comfort. At the very far end of this in the warm darkness he puts bits of straw and feathers to make a bed, and here the young are hatched. Until they grow older they never go down that long mysterious tunnel where mother and father run in and out, but only see in the distance the white gleam of a round hole. What a wonderful world it must seem to the young bird when he first steps out! He is very timid, and as he gets near the opening he hears the beating of the waves on the shore perhaps, and then the great wide ocean opens before him and the illimitable sky. What a big world! He must turn almost giddy with fright and amazement.

Some birds choose furze-bushes to build in, which must be prickly and uncomfortable, but are thick. Here there is a woodpecker family. The woodpecker is a fairly big bird, and he has a beautiful crimson streak on his head; with his strong bill he carves out a deep hole in a tree, right into the trunk—it is wonderful that the bird should have the strength and patience to cut into the solid wood—and when he has made a deep hole, he begins to make it bend down, and in the dip he makes his nest. The young woodpeckers are therefore shut in very tightly and safely. The parent birds run up and down the trees seeking for insects, on which they live. To see them run straight up a tree as a cat would do is very curious; but they are shy birds, and not often seen.

Other birds, like the reed-warbler, build in reeds; this seems a very safe plan. Here you see several tall green reeds growing out of the water, and about a foot above the water the bird has made a clever nest, twisting bits of roots and grass together, and lacing them in with the reeds, which are strong enough to hold such a dainty thing. So the little nest swings and sways with the wind over the water, and the reed-warbler is safe from cats, at all events; but one imagines the young birds must sometimes tumble out and get drowned before they can fly.

A very odd bird is quite near this, and that is the butcher bird. He really is a butcher—that is to say, he kills tiny animals and even other little birds, and keeps them in a larder for use. For this purpose he chooses a bush with thorns, perhaps a hawthorn, and then when he catches any small creature he sticks it on the thorns and leaves it there spiked until it is wanted. Look at this one's larder. He has a wretched little dead sparrow hanging by its neck from a big thorn, and two or three bumble-bees spiked too. We can imagine the mamma saying to the little ones: 'No, dears, you mustn't have any sparrow to-night just before you go to bed; it would give you indigestion and make you dream. Papa will have some of that for his supper, but if you'll be good children I'll give you each a bit of bumble-bee.' The mother bird is talking to a young one who has got out of its nest. They are fat, strong little birds, as they should be with such food.

After this we come to bigger birds—ducks and puffins. Puffins have beaks like poll parrots, and are about the size of a rook; they have neat white shirt-fronts, and their beaks are red and yellow and blue, but they have silly faces, as if they thought of nothing but their own fine clothes. They live near water on cliffs, and sometimes use an old rabbit burrow for a nest, in which they lay one pure white egg, and one only. When the young one is hatched the parent birds feed it on tiny fish and minnows. You can see here the puffin bringing up a minnow in his beak for supper.

Beyond are great grey and white gulls, with their keen beaks and strong legs. They are pirates, the gulls, and will eat other birds' eggs if they can get them; they are wild and fierce. Another sea-bird, very different in appearance, is the little stormy petrel. Very small and graceful; he is a thin little bird, with a dark-brown coat, but at heart as wild as the proud gulls. He is never happy except when dancing over the cold grey waves and feeling the dash of the spray. The petrel is at sea all day, and scorns the quiet land and delights of home. The howl of the storm, the clash of the water is music to it, and it would pine and die in a cage on land. When it wants to lay an egg, it makes a nest not far from its beloved sea, and lays there one egg; but even when the young one is hatched the mother cannot give up her wandering life. She is a wanderer by nature, and she only comes back at nights to see that the little one has food; then away to the wild tossing grey water again.

The next set of birds are the owls, and very wicked and ferocious some of them look. There is the long-eared owl, with his bent-in, short, hooked nose and funny feathered ears standing straight up. The little owls are balls of soft fluff, and are eagerly looking at the dead mouse that father owl has brought for them to eat. They have a very rough nest, merely a platform of pine-twigs thrown together in the fork of a fir-tree; but they are hardy little birds, and do not mind that at all. Close by is a monster owl, called the great eagle owl. He has bright yellow eyes, with very large pupils as black as jet; his tail is spread like a turkey-cock's, and altogether he looks very terrifying. You would not like to meet him alone if you had made him angry, for he is as large as a fair-sized dog, and his ugly claws and savage beak would make short work of your soft face and bright eyes. Luckily, you are not likely to meet him, for he doesn't live in England.

It is worth while to cross over here to the other side of the gallery and see the great bustard, with his wonderful curving white feathers. He is about the size of a small turkey, whose cousin he is, and his plumes are like those on a field-marshal's helmet. Near here are two curious sorts of nests—one the Norfolk plover, or, as he is called, thick-knee; the eggs are just laid on the sand, and are so much the same colours as the speckled stones around that you have to look hard to find them, and at a little distance they seem to vanish altogether. The funny little wee birds, too, are just like rough sand, and have two black lines down their backs; crouching down without moving, they would be well hidden. The common tern lays its eggs amongst rough stones, where you would think that anything so fragile as an egg would easily get broken. Near his case there is a beautiful pure white gull, who lives in the Arctic regions among the ice and snow. It is a wonderful law of Nature that birds and animals often resemble their surroundings. We have seen that the tiger is not easily seen among his bamboo-stems, and that birds the colour of sand live on sand; well in the Arctic regions, where there is perpetual ice and snow, nearly all the creatures are pure white, from the great Polar bear down to the rabbits and gulls. This is explained by the fact that if an animal is not white he shows up against the ground, and then his enemies, other animals waiting to prey upon him, see him, and catch him and eat him; so the white ones escape, and as children take after their parents they are white, too. And if one of the children happens to be darker he is quickly eaten, and his whiter brothers and sisters escape. This white gull has made a nest that looks like nothing but a muff of moss lying on very rough and sharp stones; there is not much reason why the little ones should want to climb out, at all events, while their feet are tender. Some enormous eagles attract attention: one with strong beak and claws. A condor near is one of the largest birds in the world. His native place is in South America, and at first when travellers brought accounts of this gigantic bird they were not believed; but at last someone managed to shoot one and brought it to England, so then he had to be believed. The one here in the Museum has spread his wings, and the length from end to end is larger than the tallest man. The hideous vultures near have scraggy necks, with a ruff round them. The vultures never kill animals for their own food, but live on the refuse that is left by other animals or men. The eagle is like the lion among the animals, and the vulture is like the jackal, who runs about picking up all the nasty bits no one else will have. In the cases beyond there are graceful swans and chubby ducks and flamingoes, birds whose long pink legs make them look as if they stood on painted stilts, and who have beautiful rose-coloured edges to their white wings. At the very end of the gallery there are two huge cases as big as the side of an ordinary room, and it is well to sit down here and look at them, for both are full of interest. In part of one the space is taken up with a great cliff, in which is the home of the golden eagle, wildest and most untameable of all eagles. He lives far up on lonely mountain heights, where the air is cold and pure. His great wings sail over vast dark chasms, where men have sometimes lost their lives. His eye sees an extraordinary distance, and his flight is very swift. He chooses for his home a cave or natural hole on the face of a high cliff; this is called the eyrie, and here he gathers together sticks, and odds and ends to make a kind of bedding for his young. When the little eaglets are young they are just like balls of white cotton-wool, with streaks of black here and there, all fluff and down, like those you see here. The mother and father birds go sailing high up in the sky, and suddenly they descend with a swift dive and pounce on some tiny lamb who has strayed from his mother's side, and perhaps fallen over the edge of a cliff and cannot get back again. He has been bleating loudly to call his mother to him, for he is too little to know he may attract enemies as well as friends; and his cries have been heard by the eagle, who comes down like an avalanche, and, seizing him firmly in its great talons, carries him away higher and higher to the nest in the cliff. Then there is a whirr and swoop, and the mother or father eagle, whichever it is, alights on the rough platform in the cliff and lays the still warm and only half-dead woolly lamb before the young ones. There is not much chance for it then, but let us hope it has been stunned and made unconscious long before this by its swift whirling voyage through the air. Eagles catch rabbits, too, and anything they can find. In one nest there were found the remains of nine grouse, four hares, part of a lamb, and many other things. Here in the eagles' nest in the gallery you can see a half-eaten rabbit's leg hanging out over the edge, and other nasty remains.

Crossing over to the big case on the other side, we see another cliff, bare and gray, and covered with white birds—geese and gulls of many different sorts. This is a copy of a bit of a famous rock off the coast of Scotland called the Bass Rock, which rises out of the sea like an enormous stone many hundreds of feet high. At the times of the year when birds make their nests it is white with wild sea-birds, and the nests are laid along the crevices and shelves of the bare rock, so near together that the birds can easily touch one another while they are sitting on them. If anyone fired a gun near the rock there would be a sudden flight up into the air of hundreds of birds all at once, like a gigantic cloud, flying, whirling, screaming, mixed up together, rising higher and higher in great circles till you would feel stunned and deafened and almost frightened, as if a piece of the sky had suddenly taken shape and broken up over your head. These wild birds know they are safe on the Bass Rock, and they take no care to protect their nests; no one could climb up those sheer precipices and steal the eggs. The birds sit there safely, looking down upon such heights as would make you giddy even to see; and in front the blue sea stretches for miles. It is a wild, free life.

Going back down the room, there may be time to notice the cases on the sides of the partitions full of stuffed birds, many very beautiful, but not so interesting as those that are shown with their nests and young ones. Quite near the door is a case with some large birds as tall as a child of seven in it. They are cassowaries, with drooping dark-brown feathers that look rather out of curl, and necks of crimson and blue. Further on there is a family of ostriches, the great father bird very grand and with a black coat, and magnificent white tail-feathers—those feathers that ladies buy for their hats, and for which they give so much money. Ostriches are kept on farms in South Africa, and their tail-feathers are pulled out at certain seasons of the year; and then they grow, again and are soon ready to be pulled out again, and people make much money this way. I do not know how much pain this gives the ostrich, but it cannot be pleasant; and perhaps he wishes sometimes he was not quite so grand, but was dressed in a plain dull-brown suit trimmed with dirty white like his humble wife. The ostrich is very savage, and can never be depended on; he may turn upon the keeper who has fed him and cared for him for years, and, seizing him, kick him with his great feet until he is stunned, or dance upon him for no reason at all. He does not look safe; his narrow flat head and cruel eyes would make you think he was a tyrant. The little ones running about at his feet look so ridiculously small in comparison that you would hardly think they could be his children; but in time they, too, will grow big like papa and have splendid tails, and lord it over their poor wives.

On the other side of the room are birds of paradise, who have also beautiful tails, but in quite a different style from the ostrich. They are smallish birds, but their long tails, reddish or yellowish in colour, fall like cascades or fountains of water on both sides. Ladies also wear these in their hats sometimes when they want to be very grand. Near them is one of the birds with the queerest habits of any bird. It builds a little bower or grotto, and decorates it with shells and whatever else it can pick up—it really seems to like to make it pretty; and then it runs about in and out of its bower for amusement. So it is called the bower bird. These birds live in Australia, and their bowers are made of bits of strong grass or thin stick woven over to make a sort of tunnel through which the bird can run. But the funniest thing is that they like to put bright things, such as shells or pretty stones about for decoration.

We must now leave the birds, which have taught us so much, and go on to other galleries. Just across the great hall is a long gallery entirely filled with the bones and skeletons of animals which are now no longer found on earth. This does not sound attractive, but it is, almost more so than the birds we have just left, though, of course, we shall not find anything pretty here.

Have you ever heard that there was a time when huge animals, larger than the largest elephant, lived and walked about on earth, not only in hot countries, but in England, too? If man lived at all in those days he must have been a poor, frightened, trembling little creature going in peril of his life from all the monsters who were around him. In England the river Thames was surrounded by a thick jungle, with mighty trees and creeping plants, like the jungles in India; and the climate was hot and steamy like the inside of a greenhouse. Here lived enormous elephants called mammoths. As we enter the gallery we see one in front of us, a monstrous creature, who makes the ordinary elephant put behind him to compare with him seem small. But larger still is the head of another behind that again. Can you even imagine a beast that could carry tusks about twelve feet long? That is to say, if two of the tallest men were laid end to end they would be as long as that elephant's tusks, and the thickness of the tusks was as great as a man's thigh. Think of all this weight! And it was resting on the head and neck of the elephant! His strength must have been like the strength of an engine. You would have been less to him than a mouse is to us. It is not only guessing that makes us say these animals lived in England, for here are the real skulls and skeletons actually found buried in the earth. Further on is what is called a sea-cow, a great fat beast weighing an enormous amount, which floated in the sea. And at the end of the room is one of the strangest of animals. Picture a creature as high as the room, standing up on its hind legs like a kangaroo, and having very strong fore-arms, with which it clutches a small tree. This is the skeleton we see now. It could have packed you away inside it and never known you were there; but, luckily for the children who lived on earth when it did (if there were any), it did not eat flesh, but only the leaves of trees and other vegetable things. It was called the giant ground sloth, and, as you may judge from this name, was not very quick in its movements. It was not found in England, but in South America, and there are now no more like it in existence; and if we had not got its skeleton we should never have known it had lived at all. There were many other curious creatures on earth then—some that lived in the water and had long necks like snakes, and fat bodies, and others like enormous lizards. There was also a big bird, bigger even than the ostrich, this you can see in a case near the sloth. Then in the centre of the room is the tall skeleton of a very, very big stag, which is to other stags as a giant would be to you. He is the Irish elk, and his skeleton was found in the peat bogs of Ireland; he must have been a magnificent creature to look at when alive, with his proud, free head and branching horns.

Passing through the hall, we see three or four cases showing examples of the different colours of animals—the white ones among the snow, and the yellow ones on the sand, the protective colouring of which we spoke before; and on the staircase sits a statue of Darwin, the wonderful man who found out this about animals, and also many other wonderful things, and made us see animal life in altogether a new way. When you are a little older you will find many things of great interest in Darwin's books. Upstairs on one side is a gallery full of humming-birds, tiny birds some of them, no bigger than butterflies, and as brilliant as jewels, red and blue and green and yellow. It must be wonderful to see them flashing about in their native land and hovering over the gorgeous flowers; but here, so many together in one case, they lose half their beauty, and they lack the sunshine to bring out their lovely colours. There is also a gallery full of pressed flowers, and here you can learn anything about flowers, leaves, and seeds; and on the other side there is one full of stuffed animals. Now, we have seen the living animals at the Zoo, and we do not care to see the dead ones here so much, though we can just glance around it. But there is one animal you must see, because there is no living animal like it in the Zoo.

This is a new animal called the okapi, only discovered during the last fifty years in the dense forests of Africa, and its skin was stuffed and set up and is now here. One would have thought that all the animals now living would have been known long ago, and it seems almost ridiculous to speak of a 'new' animal; but this one was new to us. He is very much like a mixture of several other animals. He is about the size of a large antelope, and he has a long upper lip like a giraffe, and a meek, patient face. His back slopes down like a giraffe's, too, and his body is a reddish colour like that of a cow; but his hind-legs are striped like a zebra. Now, what do you think of that for a new animal? You or I might have invented something more original. It is just as if he had been round to the other animals, and said: 'Please, I want to live. Will you give me something?' And the antelope had said: 'Well, you may be rather like me in size, but don't make yourself a shape that anyone could mistake for me.' So the poor, meek okapi had made himself the colour and size of the antelope, but had taken the sloping back of a giraffe; and then he had gone to the antelope, and said: 'Will this do?' And the antelope had not been altogether pleased, and he had said: 'Humph! I'm not sure if it will; you've taken my colour, too. Some fool might think you were me at a distance.' So the meek okapi had added a few stripes on his legs, like a zebra, just to make him less like the scornful antelope.

He lives in dense forests, and eats grass as a cow does, and is very shy; and the only people who have seen him alive are the natives, who told an Englishman about him, and then managed to shoot one, and bring its skin to sell to the Englishman. But now that he is known of, it will probably not be long before a live one is captured. He is so gentle that they might make him into what is called a domestic animal, like the cow; if he once understood that men were his friends and did not want to hurt him, then his shyness might vanish, and his gentleness would make him safe and easy to deal with.

In this gallery we see all the animals of the Zoo, stuffed and peaceful. The tiger no longer prowls round and round his cage when the dinner-hour draws near, he will never be hungry again; the lion no longer is angry when the crowd stare, he cannot see them; the patient elephant has given up for ever carrying children on his back, and the hippo has ceased to wallow in the waters of his beloved bath. Even the silver-white polar bear does not mind the heat, and pines no longer for his ice and snow. All are at rest, at rest!