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.