"
"But can any parrot be trusted to keep a secret?"
"Mine can."
"And on Sundays do you give them the same course of reading as on a
week-day, or do you make a difference?"
"On Sundays I always read them a genealogical chapter from the Old
or New Testament, for I can thus introduce their names without
profanity. I always keep tea by me in case they should ask for it
in the night, and I have an Etna to warm it for them; they take milk
and sugar. The old white-headed clergyman came to see them last
night; it was very painful, for Jocko reminded him so strongly of
his late . . . "
I thought she was going to say "wife," but it proved to have been
only of a parrot that he had once known and loved.
One evening she was in difficulties about the quarantine, which was
enforced that year on the Italian frontier. The local doctor had
gone down that morning to see the Italian doctor and arrange some
details. "Then, perhaps, my dear," she said to her husband, "he is
the quarantine." "No, my love," replied her husband. "The
quarantine is not a person, it is a place where they put people";
but she would not be comforted, and suspected the quarantine as an
enemy that might at any moment pounce out upon her and her parrots.
So a lady told me once that she had been in like trouble about the
anthem. She read in her prayer-book that in choirs and places where
they sing "here followeth the anthem," yet the person with this most
mysteriously sounding name never did follow.
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