“Nutmegs and nullification!” shrieked the parrot, as we stood before him.  “Ha, ha, ha!”

“That is condensing the matter, certainly,” I observed.

“Bienvenu, compatriote!” he repeated many times, laughing loudly, the next moment, as if in mockery.

“What a fiend it is!” said Marion, timidly; “only look at its black tongue, Miss Harz!  Then what a laugh!”

“Danton!  Danton! have you nothing to say to this strange lady?” said Madame Grambeau, addressing her bird by name; “you must not neglect my friends, Danton Pardi!”

“Bird of freedom, moulting—­moulting!” was the whimsical rejoinder.  “Jackson! give us your paw, Old Hick—­Hick—­Hickory!”

“This is the stuff Major Favraud taught him,” she apologized, “when he used to lie on his porch day after day, after his hostile meeting with Juarez, which took place on that hill,” signifying the site of the duel with her slender cane.  “It was there they fought their duel, a Poutrance, and I knew it not until too late!  His wife was too ill to come to him at that time, and the task of nursing him devolved on me, since when, on maternal principles, the lad has grown into my affections.”

“The lad of forty-odd!” sneered Duganne, unnoticed, apparently, by the aged lady, however, at the moment, but not without amusing other hearers by this sally.  Dr. Durand was especially delighted.

“For he is a boy at heart,” she said later, “this same Victor Favraud of ours,” gazing reprovingly around.  “Indeed, he is the only American I have ever seen who possessed real gaiete de coeur, and for that, I imagine, he must thank his French extraction.”

“Calhoun and cotton!” “Coal and codfish!” shouted the parrot at the top of his voice.  “Catfish and coffee!”—­“Rice cakes for breakfast”—­“All in my eye, Betty Martin”—­“Yarns and Yankees”—­“Shad and shin-plasters”—­“Yams and yaller boys,” and so on, in a string of the most irrelevant alliteration and folly, that, like much other nonsense, evoked peals of laughter by its unexpected utterance, and which at last mollified and brought out Major Favraud himself, from his dignified retirement.

“You have ruined the morals of my bird,” said Madame Grambeau, reproachfully.  “Approach, Favraud, and justify yourself.  In former times his discourse was discreet.  He knew many wise proverbs and polite salutations in French and English both, most of which he has discarded in favor of your profane and foolish teachings.  He is as bad as the ‘Vert-vert’ of Voltaire.  I shall have to expel him soon, I fear.”

“Danton, how can you so grieve your mistress?” remonstrated Major Favraud, lifting at the same time an admonitory finger, at which recognized signal, a part of past instructions probably, the parrot burst forth at once in a series of the most grotesque and outre oaths ear ever heard, ending (by the aid of some prompting from his teacher) by dismally croaking the fragment of a popular song thus travestied: