“Talking of the prices of birds, I’ve seen an ostrich that cost three hundred pounds,” said the taxidermist, recalling his youth of travel. “Three hundred pounds!  
”
He looked at me over his spectacles. “I’ve seen another that was refused at four.”
“No,” he said, “it wasn’t any fancy points. They was just plain ostriches. A little off colour, too—owing to dietary. And there wasn’t any particular restriction 
 
of the demand either. You’d have thought five ostriches would have ruled cheap on an East Indiaman. But the point was, one of ’em had swallowed a diamond.
“The chap it got it off was Sir Mohini Padishah, a tremendous swell, a Piccadilly swell you might say up to the neck of him, and then an ugly black head and a 
 
whopping turban, with this diamond in it. The blessed bird pecked suddenly and had it, and when the chap made a fuss it realised it had done wrong, I suppose, and went 
 
and mixed itself with the others to preserve its incog. It all happened in a minute. I was among the first to arrive, and there was this heathen going over his gods, 
 
and two sailors and 267the man who had charge of the birds laughing fit to split. It was a rummy way of losing a jewel, come to think of it. The man in charge hadn’t 
 
been about just at the moment, so that he didn’t know which bird it was. Clean lost, you see. I didn’t feel half sorry, to tell you the truth. The beggar had been 
 
swaggering over his blessed diamond ever since he came aboard.
“A thing like that goes from stem to stem of a ship in no time. Every one was talking about it. Padishah went below to hide his feelings. At dinner—he pigged at a 
 
table by himself, him and two other Hindoos—the captain kind of jeered at him about it, and he got very excited. He turned round and talked into my ear. He would not 
 
buy the birds; he would have his diamond. He demanded his rights as a British subject. His diamond must be found. He was firm upon that. He would appeal to the House 
 
of Lords. The man in charge of the birds was one of those wooden-headed chaps you can’t get a new idea into anyhow. He refused any proposal to interfere with the 
 
birds by way of medicine. His instructions were to feed them so-and-so and treat them so-and-so, and it was as much as his place was worth not to feed them so-and-so, 
 
and treat them so-and-so. Padishah had wanted a stomach-pump—though you can’t do that to a bird, you know. This Padishah was full of bad law, like most of these 
 
blessed Bengalis, and talked of 268having a lien on the birds, and so forth. But an old boy, who said his son was a London barrister, argued that what a bird swallowed 
 
became ipso facto part of the bird, and that Padishah’s only remedy lay in an action for damages, and even then it might be possible to show contributory negligence. 
 
He hadn’t any right of way about an ostrich that didn’t belong to him. That upset Padishah extremely, the more so as most of us expressed an opinion that that was 
 
the reasonable view. There wasn’t any lawyer aboard to settle the matter, so we all talked pretty free. At last, after Aden, it appears that he came round to the 
 
general opinion, and went privately to the man in charge and made an offer for all five ostriches.
“The next morning there was a fine shindy at breakfast. The man hadn’t any authority to deal with the birds, and nothing on earth would induce him to sell; but it 
 
seems he told Padishah that a Eurasian named Potter had already made him an offer, and on that Padishah denounced Potter before us all. But I think the most of us 
 
thought it rather smart of Potter, and I know that when Potter said that he’d wired at Aden to London to buy the birds, and would have an answer at Suez, I cursed 
 
pretty richly at a lost opportunity.
“At Suez, Padishah gave way to tears—actual wet tears—when Potter became the owner of the birds, and offered him two hundred and fifty right off for the five, being 
 
more than two hundred per 269cent. on what Potter had given. Potter said he’d be hanged if he parted with a feather of them—that he meant to kill them off one by 
 
one, and find the diamond; but afterwards, thinking it over, he relented a little. He was a gambling hound, was this Potter, a little queer at cards, and this kind of 
 
prize-packet business must have suited him down to the ground. Anyhow, he offered, for a lark, to sell the birds separately to separate people by auction at a starting 
 
price of ￡80 for a bird. But one of them, he said, he meant to keep for luck.
“You must understand this diamond was a valuable one—a little Jew chap, a diamond merchant, who was with us, had put it at three or four thousand when Padishah had 
 
shown it to him—and this idea of an ostrich gamble caught on. Now it happened that I’d been having a few talks on general subjects with the man who looked after 
 
these ostriches, and quite incidentally he’d said one of the birds was a............