“Everybody has troubles,” said Billie. “There’s something the matter with good Mr. Martin. He sighs when his wife is not in the room, and his eyes are troubled—Dicky-Dick, I’m going to sleep again.”
“Oh, no, Billie,” I said; “keep awake and talk to me. Wouldn’t you like to hear a story about a canary that belonged to a friend of our Mary? It could talk and said quite well, ‘Baby! Baby!’”
Billie became wide awake. “Nonsense!” she said sharply. “Canaries can’t talk.”
“Billie dear,” I said gently, for I was afraid of rousing her temper, which is pretty quick
sometimes, “you have lived in a very quiet way, and you have traveled only from New York to Toronto. How can you know everything about canaries?”
“I used to know one in the café,” said Billie sharply, “a little green fellow with a top-knot. He died after a while. The smoke from the men’s pipes killed him.”
“And did you know another one?”
“Yes, the grocer at the Four Corners had a yellow one, but he never talked. I mean real talk that human beings could understand. Of course, we animals have our own language that people don’t know at all. In fact, we can talk right before them, and they don’t know it.”
“Then you have known two canaries only in your life,” I said, “and yet you lay down rules about them. Do you know that there are Scotch Fancy canaries with flat snakelike heads and half circle bodies, and big English canaries, notably the Manchester Coppy?”
“What’s that?” asked Billie. “It sounds like a policeman.”