interest. "You
have heard him say much more than this at times? The words he has just
uttered are not those of the sermon or poem you mentioned?"

M. Peyron opened his hands expansively before him. "Oh, _mon Dieu_, no,
monsieur," he answered, with effusion. "You should hear him recite it.
He's never done. It is whole chapters--whole chapters; a perfect Henriade
in parrot-talk. When once he begins, there's no possibility of checking
or stopping him. On, on he goes. Farewell to the rest; he insists on
pouring it all forth to the very last sentence. Gabble, gabble, gabble;
chatter, chatter, chatter; pouf, pouf, pouf; boum, boum, boum; he runs
ahead eternally in one long discordant sing-song monotone. The person who
taught him must have taken entire months to teach him, a phrase at a
time, paragraph by paragraph. It is wonderful a bird's memory could hold
so much. But till now, taking it for granted he spoke only some wild
South Pacific dialect, I never paid much attention to Methuselah's
vagaries."

"Hush. He's going to speak," Muriel cried, holding up, in alarm, one
warning finger.

And the bird, his tongue-strings evidently loosened by the strange
recurrence after so many years of those familiar English sounds, "Pretty
Poll! Pretty Poll!" opened his mouth again in a loud chuckle of delight,
and cried, with persistent shrillness, "God save the king! A fig for
all arrant knaves and roundheads!"

A creepier feeling than ever came over the two English listeners at those
astounding words. "Great heavens!" Felix exclaimed to the unsuspecting
Frenchman, "he speaks in the style of the Stuarts and the Commonwealth!"

The Frenchman started. "_Epoque Louis Quatorze_!" he murmured,
translating the date mentally into his own more familiar chronology. "Two
centuries since! Oh, incredible! incredible! Methuselah is old, but not
quite so much of a patriarch as that. Even Humboldt's parrot could hardly
have lived for two hundred years in the wilds of South America."

Felix regarded the venerable creature with a look of almost superstitious
awe. "Facts are facts," he answered shortly, shutting his mouth with a
little snap. "Unless this bird has been deliberately taught historical
details in an archaic diction--and a shipwrecked sailor is hardly likely
to be antiquarian enough to conceive such an idea--he is undoubtedly a
survival from the days of the Commonwealth or the Restoration. And you
say he runs on with his tale for an hour