incidentally I thought I would tell him--you'd told me, you remember, how
your accounts of your two birds had warmed him up and melted his
feelings----"

"I didn't tell you. My wife told your wife, and your wife, I----"

"Yes, yes. Well, anyhow, I thought I'd try the same game, so I told him
how I had stuffed a bird once upon a time myself. It was a pigeon, with
every feather as white as snow; a fan-tail. It had belonged to my little
boy who died. I thought it would make such a beautiful emblem at his
funeral, rising with wings outspread, you know, typical of the
resurrection--we buried him from the Sunday-school, you remember. And so I
killed it and wired it and stuffed it myself. It was hard to hang it in a
soaring attitude, owing to its being a fan-tail, but I managed it."

"And you told that to Manouvrier! What did he say?"

"Say? He never so much as cracked a smile. When I'd done he stood so
still, looking at me, that I turned and sort o' stroked the turkey and
said, jestingly, says I, 'How much a pound for this gobbler?'"

"That ought to have warmed him up."

"Well, it didn't. He smiled like a dancing-master, lifted my hand off the
bird and says, says he, 'She's not for sale.' Then he turned to go into
his back room and leave me standing there. Well, that warmed _me_ up. Says
I, 'What in thunder is it here for, then? and if it ain't for sale, come
back here and show me what is!'

"'Nawtin',' says 'e, with the same polite smile. 'Nawtin' for sale. I come