The Turkey's Cousin To take up another critic of Christmas
practices, the turkey has been condemned as dull and un-English. It is, perhaps, a successor to the bustard which was once a quite common English bird, and, as the biggest of all game birds, much appreciated as winter fare. It' vanished rather.more than a century ago, chiefly owing to its popularity as food, and some vain attempts to restore it have failed, in part from the lack of the wilder conditions that it liked. The bustard, often called the wild turkey, is not, strictly speaking, a turkey, but it at least suggests it. I once travelled ih Queensland by a most desultory train, known as the Turkey Express, for the reason that when the engine-driver saw a • bustard's bust protruding from the long grass he stopped the train in order to shoot it. The bird was altogether too easy a victim for survival, only less tame than " the fool partridge "—one of which I once shot with a pistol in the Selkirks after a near miss that induced the bird to move about two feet further off
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