I wished we had stayed longer, and tried harder to understand what they said, because it was an adventure, take it how you like, that we're not likely to look upon the like of again. Only we were too flustered to see this.
We said, "Don't mention it," and things like that; and when Dicky said, "I think we ought to be going," Oswald said so too.
Then they all began talking Chinese like mad, and the Chinese lady came back and suddenly gave Alice a parrot.
It was red and green, with a very long tail, and as tame as any pet fawn I ever read about. It walked up her arm and round her neck, and stroked her face with its beak. And it did not bite Oswald or Alice, or even Dicky, though they could not be sure at first that it was not going to.
We said all the polite things we could, and the old lady made thousands of hurried Chinese replies, and repeated many times, "All litey, John," which seemed to be all the English she knew.
We never had so much fuss made over us in all our lives. I think it was that that upset our calmness, and seemed to put us into a sort of silly dream that made us not see what idiots we were to hurry off from scenes we should never again behold. So we went. And the youthful Celestial saw us safely to the top of Bullamy's Stairs, and left us there with the parrot and floods of words that seemed all to end in double "e."
We wanted to show him to the others, but he would not come, so we rejoined our anxious relations without him.
The scene of rejoinder was painful, at first because they were most frightfully sick at us having been such an age away; but when we let them look at the parrot, and told them about the fight, they agreed that it was not our fault, and we really had been unavoidably detained.
But Dora said, "Well, you may say I'm always preaching, but I don't think Father would like Alice to be fighting street boys in Millwall."
"I suppose you'd have run away and let the old man be killed," said Dicky, and peace was not restored till we were nearly at Greenwich again.