“Don’t you mean black wings, Katherine?” asked Betty hastily.
“Did I say blue? I meant black of course. Mary thought they looked blue and that confused me. And its breast was white with brown marks on it.”
“What size was it?” asked Roberta.
Katherine looked doubtful. “What should you say, Mary?”
“Well, it was quite small–about the size of a sparrow or a robin, I thought.”
“They’re quite different sizes,” said Roberta wearily. “Your old man must have been color-blind. It couldn’t have had a pink head. Who ever heard of a pink-headed bird?”
“We three are not color-blind,” Katherine reminded her. “And then there’s the name.” Roberta sighed deeply. The new members of the Mary-bird club were very unmanageable.
Meanwhile Mary was industriously counting the names on her list, which must be handed in the next day. “I think I’d better put the euthuma down, Roberta,” she said finally. “We saw it all right. They won’t look the list over very carefully, but they will notice how many birds are on it, and even with the pink-headed euthuma I haven’t but forty-five. I rather wish now that I’d bought a text-book, but I thought it was a waste of money when you knew all about the birds, and it would certainly be a waste of money now.”
“Oh, yes,” said Roberta. “If only the library hadn’t wanted its copy back quite so soon!”
“It was disagreeable of them, wasn’t it?” said Mary cheerfully, copying away on her list. “You were going to look up the nestle too. Girls, did we hear the nestle sing?”