sibility, but when
Polonius, cocking his head and peering down on the collie with one
round orange eye, crisply remarked:

"Hello! What's that? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!" Hamlet went wild with
amazement. After making from every side vain leaps and scrambles toward
the unperturbed parrot, he tore from one of us to another, with whines
and imploring gaze striving to learn what this apparition might mean

"So horridly to shake" his "disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches" of his soul.

A week has passed and I begin to fear that Hamlet's antipathy to
Polonius, "a foolish prating knave," a "wretched, rash, intruding
fool," is too deeply rooted in drama for life to eradicate. The fault
does not lie with the parrot. Though with him, as a rule, "brevity is
the soul of wit," he accosts Hamlet quite as cordially as any other
member of the family, with "Hello" when the dog trots into the room and
"Good-by" when he trots out. He is, indeed, so far in sympathy with
Hamlet that, well-nigh to our despair, he seconds the collie's uncivil
clamor when the doorbell rings by stentorian shouts of "Fire! _Fire!!_
FIRE!!!" We do not admit that, in general, Polonius talks only "words,
words, words." If he does, the coincidences are uncanny, for he warns
"Look out" as we lift his heavy cage and pronounces "All right" as we
set it safely down. I was adding a column of figures yesterday and, as
I named the total, Polonius said in an approving tone: "That's right;
that's it." He has a mild curiosity about our doings and occasionally
responds to our overtures by offering to an outstretched finger the
chilly grip of his clay-colored claws,--invariably, like a well-bred
bird, presenting the right foot. If Housewife Honeyvoice undertakes to
scratch the parrot's green head, Hamlet rears up against her and
insists that the same ceremony be performed on his yellow one.
Polonius, for his part, though too blase for jealousy, has a proper
self-respect, and when he overhears us comforting our troubled collie
with murmurs of "Good Hamlet! Dear Hamlet!" promptly interjects "Pretty
Pol."

But Hamlet, who is so sensitive to suffering that he will go of his own
impulse to any visitor in trouble and press close, lavishing all his
shy caresses in the effort to console, need not fear that Polonius will
usurp his place in my affection. It is all I have to give him and I
shall not fail him there. I cannot give that fearful, only half-quieted
heart the sec