But the Frenchman bowed, and laid his hand on his heart.  “Ah, mademoiselle,” he said, “your wish is almost a royal command.  And yet, do you know, it is so long since I have sung, except to please myself—­my music is so rusty, old pieces you have heard—­I have no accompaniment, no score—­mais enfin, we are all so far from Paris!”

Muriel didn’t dare to undeceive him as to her meaning, lest he should refuse to sing in real earnest, and the chance of learning the parrot’s secret might slip by them irretrievably.  “Oh, monsieur,” she cried, fitting herself to his humor at once, and speaking as ceremoniously as if she were assisting at a musical party in the Avenue Victor Hugo, “don’t decline, I beg of you, on those accounts.  We are both most anxious to hear your song.  Don’t disappoint us, pray.  Please begin immediately.”

“Ah, mademoiselle,” the Frenchman said, “who could resist such an appeal?  You are altogether too flattering.”  And then, in the same cheery voice that Felix had heard on the first day he visited the King of Birds’ hut, M. Peyron began, in very decent style, to pour forth the merry sounds of his rollicking song: 

“Quand on conspi-re,
    Quand sans frayeur
 On peut se di-re
    Conspirateur—­
 Pour tout le mon-de
    Il faut avoir
 Perruque blon-de
    Et collet noir.”

He had hardly got as far as the end of the first stanza, however, when Methuselah, listening, with his ear cocked up most knowingly, to the Frenchman’s song, raised his head in opposition, and, sitting bolt upright on his perch, began to scream forth a voluble stream of words in one unbroken flood, so fast that Muriel could hardly follow them.  The bird spoke in a thick and very harsh voice, and, what was more remarkable still, with a distinct and extremely peculiar North Country accent.  “In the nineteenth year of the reign of his most gracious majesty, King Charles the Second,” he blurted out, viciously, with an angry look at the Frenchman, “I, Nathaniel Cross, of the borough of Sunderland, in the county of Doorham, in England, an able-bodied mariner, then sailing the South Seas in the good bark Martyr Prince, of the Port of Great Grimsby, whereof one Thomas Wells, gent., under God, was master—­”

“Oh, hush, hush!” Muriel cried, unable to catch the parrot’s precious words through the emulous echo of the Frenchman’s music.  “Whereof one Thomas Wells, gent., under God, was master—­go on, Polly.”

“Perruque blonde
   Et collet noir,”

the Frenchman repeated, with a half-offended voice, finishing his stanza.

But just as he stopped, Methuselah stopped too, and, throwing back his head in the air with a triumphant look, stared hard at his vanquished and silenced opponent out of those blinking gray eyes of his.  “I thought I’d be too much for you!” he seemed to say, wrathfully.

“Whereof one Thomas Wells, gent., under God, was master,” Muriel suggested again, all agog with excitement.  “Go on, good bird!  Go on, pretty Polly.”