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Rh meekly edge away from him without attempting to answer him in his own language, he asked in a hoarse, thick voice, to correspond with his bald pate:

"Who are you?"

"Alas! my noble lord," I replied (fearing that he might give me another dig), "I cannot tell. I thought that I was a blackbird, but I am convinced now that I am not."

The strangeness of my answer, and my apparent truthfulness, seemed to interest him. He approached me and made me relate my history, which I did in all sadness and humility, as befitted my position and the unpleasantness of the weather.

"If you were a carrier-pigeon like me," he said to me when I had finished, "the pitiful trifles that you are bewailing so would not disturb your mind an instant. We travel—that is the way we make our living—and we have our loves, indeed, but I don't know who my father is. Cleaving the air, making our way through space, beholding plains and mountains lying at our feet, inhaling the pure ether of the skies and not the exhalations of the earth, hastening to an appointed destination that we never fail to reach, therein lie our pleasures and our life. I travel further in one day than a man can in ten."

"Upon my word, sir," said I, plucking up a little courage, "you are a bird of Bohemia."

"That is something that I never bother my head about," he replied. "I have no country; I know but three things: travel, my wife, and my little ones."

"But what is it that you have hanging about your neck there? It looks like an old twisted curl-paper."

"They are papers of importance," he answered,