ange jargon so often that it had ceased to have even the
possibility of a meaning for him. It was the way of Methuselah--just his
language that he talked; so harsh! so guttural! "Pretty Poll! Pretty
Poll!" he had noticed the bird harp upon those quaint words again and
again. They were part, no doubt, of that old primitive and forgotten
Pacific language the creature had learned in other days from some earlier
bearer of the name and ghastly honors of Tu-Kila-Kila. Why should these
English seem so profoundly moved by them?

"Mademoiselle doesn't surely understand the barbarous dialect which our
Methuselah speaks!" he exclaimed in surprise, glancing half suspiciously
from one to the other of these incomprehensible Britons. Like most other
Frenchmen, he had been brought up in total ignorance of every European
language except his own; and the words the parrot pronounced, when
delivered with the well-known additions of parrot harshness and parrot
volubility, seemed to him so inexpressibly barbaric in their clicks and
jerks that he hadn't yet arrived at the faintest inkling of the truth as
he observed their emotion.

Felix seized his new friend's hand in his and wrung it warmly. "Don't you
see what it is?" he exclaimed, half beside himself with this vague hope
of some unknown solution. "Don't you realize how the thing stands?
Don't you guess the truth? This isn't a Polynesian, dialect at all. It's
our own mother tongue. The bird speaks English!"

"English!" M. Peyron replied, with incredulous scorn. "What! Methuselah
speak English! Oh, no, monsieur, impossible. _Vous vous trompez, j'en
suis sur_. I can never believe it. Those harsh, inarticulate sounds to
belong to the noble language of Shaxper and Newtowne! _Ah, monsieur,
incroyable! vous vous trompez; vous vous trompez!_"

As he spoke, the bird put its head on one side once more, and, looking
out of its half-blind old eyes with a crafty glance round the corner at
Muriel, observed again, in not very polite English, "Pretty Poll! Pretty
Poll! Polly wants some fruit! Polly wants a nut! Polly wants to go to
bed!... God save the king! To hell with all papists!"

"Monsieur," Felix said, a certain solemn feeling of surprise coming over
him slowly at this last strange clause, "it is perfectly true. The bird
speaks English. The bird that knows the secret of which we are all in
search--the bird that can tell us the truth about Tu-Kila-Kila--can tell
us in the tongue which mademoise