Sleep little pigeon and fold your wings,
     Little blue pigeon with velvet eyes.
Sleep to the singing of mother-bird swinging,
     Swinging the nest where her little one lies.

In through the window a moonbeam comes,
     Little gold moonbeam with misty Wings,
All silently creeping it asks is he sleeping,
     Sleeping and dreaming while mother sings ?
But sleep little pigeon and fold your wings,
     Little blue pigeon with mournful eyes.
Am I not singing? See I am swinging,
     Swinging the nest where my darling lies.
                         — Eugene Field.

ONE day a carrier pigeon tapped at the window of Mrs. Nansen's home at Christiania. Instantly the window was opened, and the wife of the great Arctic explorer in another moment covered the little messenger with kisses and caresses. The carrier pigeon had been away from the cottage thirty long months, but had not forgotten the way home. It brought a note from Nansen, stating that all was going well with his expedition in the polar regions. Nansen had fastened a message to the bird and turned it loose. The frail courier darted out into the Arctic air, flew like an arrow over perhaps a thousand miles of frozen waste, and then over another thousand miles of ocean and plain and forest, to enter the window of its waiting mistress and deliver the message which she had been awaiting so anxiously. We boast of human sagacity and endurance, but this loving carrier pigeon, after an absence of thirty months, accomplished a feat so wonderful that we can only give ourselves up to wonder and admiration.

Utilization of the homing instinct of the domesticated varieties of the Blue Rock pigeon, the columba livia, by employing the birds as messengers for physicians living at some distance from their patients, is comparatively new and is the latest evidence of the value of these birds. A few doctors have made the experiment, and it only remains to prove the facility with which the pigeons can be employed in order to determine whether they are likely to come into general use for this purpose.

The importance of establishing pigeon service for busy, overworked country doctors is strongly urged in favor of the plan, and it is agreed that there is no other such efficient or speedy means of carrying messages.

The carrier dove, which is the emblem of peace, though used in these times for carrying war messages, obeys the one governing impulse of its small heart when, released at a distance from its mate and its nest, it turns with marvelous fidelity to its home cote. With no compass except that home-seeking instinct, no reliance except in the exquisitely adjusted beat of its wings, it soars upward until its keen eyesight and quick perceptions give certainty of direction; then, at a splendid pace of 1,400 yards in a minute, it speeds on its journey home.

Once a male bird has regularly mated he will fly back to his duties as a husband and father as fast as he can. These duties are serious and practical, for the male bird bears his full share in sitting upon the eggs and in feeding the nestlings when hatched, for which purpose both cock and hen possess special faculties and functions. The homing tendency acts best when it is entirely concentrated. For example, it has been found that a mated pair will not fly home together with anything like proper certainty. They stop and dally by the way; they behave like holiday people who have "got somebody to mind the babies."

In order to have trustworthy messengers for war or peace the pigeons must not be bachelors nor loafers nor be flown with associates; they must be the respectable mated birds with establishments, so that in employing them for war messengers one actually presses domestic virtue, as well as love and parental instinct, into the service of the military.

But even the peaceful pigeon can be sometimes pugnacious on his own account, and a jealous fantail, or tumbler, or Antwerp, or Jacobin often will conduct himself like a game cock, though painters and poets from time immemorial have agreed to regard this bird as the natural emblem of gentleness and peace. It is the accepted token of the Holy Spirit, "which descended in the form of a dove." All literatures are full of this thought.