The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 304: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE TIGER 279 going forth to trust entirely to hazard and to accident to guide him out of this dread, inhospitable region. Not far had the Burker proceeded when at a distance of about a hundred yards ahead he perceived a tall object, which he had at first taken for a tree or shrub, suddenly put itself in motion. What at the outset he had fancied to be the branches all in an instant expanded and seemed to be flapping violently. The idea that it could be a bird flashed through the Burker’s mind, but a bird of at least seven feet in height appeared to him an impossibility. Yet a second thought made him reflect that a country which could produce snakes so monstrous as those which he had seen might contain amongst its zoological wonders birds as colossal as the object which he now beheld at a little distance. He stood still, less terrified perhaps than he had been at the sight of other living things the very names of which made the blood run cold and the flesh creep upon the bones, but still he was far from feeling comfortable. It was indeed a bird which the man was contemplating, and it was now walking slowly away from the spot where he first saw it. We may as well inform the reader that it was one of the adjutant species, which often attains the height of five feet, and sometimes grows to the proportions of this specimen which the Burker was now surveying. Slowly it proceeded, until appearing suddenly to catch sight of a form to which the eye was unaccustomed, it advanced toward the Burker. Now the man was seized with a com- plete terror; he turned and fled. But the giant adjutant bird was speedily in his close vicinage, and, apprehending a sudden attack, he snatched up a large stone against which his foot kicked. Fortunate for him was it that he stepped back at the same moment with the speed of lightning, for from the very spot whence he had picked up the stone, a cobra di capello darted forth, raising its hideous hooded head, hissing and preparing to spring at him. In another moment the adjutant bird seized the cobra in its bill, and the Burker availed himself of the circumstance to place a still greater interval between himself. and that colossal specimen of the feathered tribe. He looked back; the reptile had disappeared from the bill of the bird, and the bird itself was slowly walking away in a contrary direction to that which the Burker was pursuing. CORnNICLOOKS (C©)