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Rh The yellow head was cocked on one side, the powerful beak ajar, so to speak, and the red eye fixed us in a gaze of unabashed and disconcerting penetration. She had the look of one who weighs and observes but suspends judgment. The same non-committal air still marked her demeanor when with cheerful chirrups, we sought to make friendly advance. She neither accepted nor declined. She simply stared on, curious, detached, inscrutable.

Polly's education had not yet begun when she became an inmate of our establishment, but she had been recommended to us as a promising aspirant after knowledge. Her first achievement in the way of vocabulary was a tentative "Hello!" uttered in a soft accent and with an air of surprise quite different from the stentorian noises suggestive of profanity, with which she was wont to express her own fleeting emotions. Some would-be humorist has intimated that parrots were devils before they became parrots, and their secret ambition is to become devils again. Most humorists lean to exaggeration, but Polly's behavior certainly led to the conviction that there was something in this theory. She took pains to make it evident that she enjoyed being rude