“Oh, the gizzard!” said Tommy Smith. “I know what that is, because I have”—and then he stopped all of a sudden. He had been going to say that he had tasted it sometimes when there was fowl for dinner, but he thought he had better not. It didn’t seem quite delicate to talk to a woodpigeon about eating a fowl.
“The gizzard is the mill that I am talking about,” said the woodpigeon. “All the food that we eat goes into it, and then it is ground up, just as corn is ground between two hard stones. But though our gizzard is very hard, it is not quite so hard as stones are, so we swallow some small sharp stones, which go into our gizzard, and are rolled about with the grain and seeds there, and help to crush them. Then, when they are nice and soft, they are ready to go on into the stomach. So now you know what sort of thing a gizzard is, and why we swallow stones.”
“But don’t the stones hurt you?” asked Tommy Smith.
“Do you think we would swallow them if they did?” answered the woodpigeon. “What a foolish question to ask!”
Tommy Smith stood for a little while thinking about it, and wondering if he had a mill inside him, till at last the woodpigeon said, “Perhaps you would like to ask me a sensible question.”
“Oh yes,” said Tommy Smith, and he tried to think what was a sensible question. He had thought of a good many questions to ask, and they had seemed sensible at the time, but now he began to feel afraid that the woodpigeon would think them foolish. At last he said, “Please, Mr. Woodpigeon, where do you live?”
“Oh, in this tree,” said the woodpigeon, “half-way up on the seventeenth storey.”
“I suppose you mean the seventeenth branch,” said Tommy Smith.
“Of course I do,” said the woodpigeon. “I have my nest there, and my wife is sitting on the eggs now.”
“Oh, do let me see them,” cried Tommy Smith.