“Let me see,” cooed the woodpigeon. “This morning I had a few peas and beans, besides some oats and barley. I got those in the fields, and I found some green clover there too, as well as some wild mustard, and some ragweed and charlock, and a few other seeds and roo-oo-oo-oots.”
“Oh dear, Mr. Woodpigeon,” said Tommy Smith; “why, what a lot you do eat.”
“I don’t call that much,” said the woodpigeon. “When I was tired of looking about in the fields, I went to the woods again, and got a few acorns, and some beechnuts, and”—
“Oh! but look here, Mr. Woodpigeon,” said Tommy Smith. “You couldn’t have eaten all those this morning, because they are not all ripe now, and”—
“I didn’t say they were ripe,” said the woodpigeon; “and if I didn’t eat them this morning, then I did on some other morning, so it’s all the same. Those are the things I eat, at anyrate, and I can’t be expected to remember exactly when I eat them. I had a few stones though, of course. They are always to be had, whatever time of year it is. Stones are always in season.”
“Stones!” cried Tommy Smith in great surprise. “Oh, come now; I know you don’t eat them.”
“Oh, don’t I?” said the woodpigeon. “I should be very sorry if I couldn’t get any,—I know that. It would be a nice thing, indeed, if one couldn’t have a few stones to eat with one’s meals. That would be a good joke.”
Tommy Smith thought that he wouldn’t think it a joke to have to eat stones, and he could hardly believe that the woodpigeon was speaking the truth. But he was such an innocent-looking bird, and seemed so very respectable, that he thought he must be. “Are they very large stones?” he asked at last.
“Oh no,” answered the woodpigeon. “They are not large, but very small—just the right size to go into my mill.”