However much we may feel inclined to give our pets plenty of such dainties as sugar, cake, and other rich food that we know Dickey is as fond of as any boy of sweets, yet it will not do for us to forget that plain simple diet is far more likely to keep him in good health.

It is easy enough to accustom canaries to eat and enjoy whatever comes to table, but in canaries as well as children, in so doing we lay the foundation of future disease, and early death. While, on the contrary, poor people who are not acquainted with even the names of these delicacies, succeed in rearing healthy, lively, and handsome birds.

The best regular daily food for the canary is a mixture of rape and canary seed, with a few hemp-seed, more in winter than in summer, as it is oily and heating. There have been many opinions on the subject of giving birds hemp-seed. It certainly does tend, homceopathically, to shorten the duration of their lives; but still, strange though true, they cannot live without it. It warms their stomach, and possesses an oleaginous peculiarity of flavor, which mixing with the other food, forms a good general diet. It must be given sparingly. It is greyish brown outside, and has a hard shell that the birds when weakly, or quite young, are not able to break; it should therefore be slightly cracked before being given to such birds. It is white inside, and tastes like a nut. The birds are so fond of it that they will take it from the hand when they will not any other food.

Rape-seed is a round blackish-brown little seed with a bright yellow kernel, looking like the yelk of an egg.

Canary-seed is the produce of Canary grass, and should be hard, bright, and of a brownish-yellow color, and look white and flowery when broken through.

It is essential that seeds should be kept where mice cannot get at them. Birds have a horror of seed that mice have been among; in fact, they will not eat it unless they are very hungry. A bottle or china jar with a cover is best to store them in. Birds have been almost starved to death by having seeds given to them that had the inside eaten out by mice, while the outward appearance of the seeds was entire.

Oats or oatmeal may be given with the seeds, or bread or barley meal moistened with milk, given fresh every day. In sum. mer canaries should be supplied with green food - cabbage, salad, celery, groundsel, turnip tops, chick-weed, water-cress, if well washed, and in winter with pieces of sweet apple. They will also relish occasionally a little boiled carrot or cauliflower. Sugar at rare intervals will not hurt them, but the less of it the better; they enjoy water-cracker or pilot bread suspended in their cage, or stale bread grated may be given to them. The English books do not mention a common appendage to an American cage; a cuttle-fish bone is hung in the cage or placed between the wires, and the bird often resorts to it for the lime it contains, and apparently to sharpen its beak. Birds waste their seed terribly, and if they can get into the seed cups they scatter it about and spoil it; some people have a cover to the cup with small round holes in it, or a coarse wire gauze over it. It is less trouble to feed birds on seeds as a general rule, and one author says: "It seems to me the most plain course to take - and my own birds have, generally, never tasted anything but seeds and vegetables, with a little egg, or a few stale bread crumbs, for weeks and months together." In the case of both hemp and rape-seed, it must be remembered that they are heating food, and contain a large amount of oil. In the summer, birds having as much green food as they like, often do not eat a great deal of seed ; but where they are fed entirely on seed, it would be necessary to make a marked difference between summer and winter diet. When birds are exposed to some cold, have exercise and green food, the rape and hemp, in the proportion of one to three parts of canary seed, will seldom be found too much. An old bird brought up without hemp, would suffer were it given to him.

The seed box should be cleaned out daily, the husks of the seeds blown away, and the good returned to the box. It is well to see at night that the birds have food enough for the next morning's breakfast, if they are not fed in the morning before daylight; great injury has been done by forgetfulness of birds' sarly habits, and a few hours' waiting for bod in the morning, especially in the caac. of nestlings, is most severely felt. Very dien indeed, it gives a check from which they do not recover. A bird's day is from sunrise to sunset.

A cage bird is very liable to suffer from thirst; he has scattered all the water from the cup, and it not being replenished more than once a day, he becomes exhausted and cannot eat. No owner of a bird should retire at night without seeing that the water cup is supplied. The fixtures to the bell and pagoda-shaped wire cages are much safer for the bird than the hanging glasses, which have doubtless killed many birds, and caused the greatest suffering in others, from the water in them being too low to be reached.

German Paste. - Bruise in a large mortar, or on a table with a rolling-pin, a pint, or quart, as may be required, of rape-seed, in such a manner that you may blow the chaff away; to this add a good-sized piece of stale bread, reducing the whole to powder, and well mixing together: put them in a wooden box, which should be kept from the sun.

A teaspoonfuls , with the addition 01 yelk of egg, and a few drops 01 water, will make an excellent food for young birds; to the old ones it may be given dry. The powder must not be kept more than two weeks, as the rape-seed is apt to turn sour, so that when the water is put to it it smells like mustard. It is best to make a small quantity of this paste every day; under such treatment young birds grow rapidly. Stale sponge cake, rubbed to powder, with hard white of egg, is a good food for birds for two or three days after being taken from their parents.

In the way of live food throw in occasionally ants' eggs, small red worms, spiders, etc. When the windows are kept open in summer, hundreds of flies, gnats, and other minute ephemera, will find their way into aviary cages and aviary rooms, and no small amusement is it to watch the gyrations of the birds as they topple over to catch their prey.