“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 at a time!  Good heavens, what a thought!  I wish we could manage to start him now.  Does he begin it often?”

“Monsieur,” the Frenchman answered, “when I came here first, though Methuselah was already very old and feeble, he was not quite a dotard, and he used to recite it all every morning regularly.  That was the hour, I suppose, at which the master, who first taught him this lengthy recitation, used originally to impress it upon him.  In those days his sight and his memory were far more clear than now.  But by degrees, since my arrival, he has grown dull and stupid.  The natives tell me that fifty years ago, while he was already old, he was still bright and lively, and would recite the whole poem whenever anybody presented him with his greatest dainty, the claw of a moora-crab.  Nowadays, however, when he can hardly eat, and hardly mumble, he is much less persistent and less coherent than formerly.  To say the truth, I have discouraged him in his efforts, because his pertinacity annoyed me.  So now he seldom gets through all his lesson at one bout, as he used to do at the beginning.  The best way to get him on is for me to sing him one of my French songs.  That seems to excite him, or to rouse him to rivalry.  Then he will put his head on one side, listen critically for a while, smile a superior smile, and finally begin—­jabber, jabber, jabber—­trying to talk me down, as if I were a brother parrot.”

“Oh, do sing now!” Muriel cried, with intense persuasion in her voice.  “I do so want to hear it.”  She meant, of course, the parrot’s story.