He had been a serious infant and had nursed more from a sense of duty than pleasure; his juvenile marble and hoop games had been grave affairs, conducted with nicety and decorum; he learned to read shortly after he was breeched and at seven presented a slip at the public library for the Encyclopedia from A to Z. The librarian demurred, but he gently insisted; he was permitted to carry it home volume by volume. At twelve he had resolved to be a scientist and furthermore a great scientist. He determined to pursue the career of ornithologist; there was something so dignified and withal scientific about a science that called the sparrow Passer Domesticus and the robin Erithacus Rubecula. He made rapid progress. On his thirteenth birthday he took a bird walk at dawn and was able to record in his note-book the scientific names of forty-nine birds, including the ruby-and-topaz humming-bird (Chrysolampis Mosquitus) which is rare around Boston.
At fifteen he wrote a daring monograph which proved beyond cavil that it would be possible to revivify the extinct great auk (Plautus Impennis) by a judicious and protracted series of matings between the penguin (Sphenisciformes) and the ostrich (Struthio Camelus). This theory was hotly challenged by a German savant in a seventy thousand word exegesis; Hervey Deyo crushed him under a hundred thousand word rejoinder and thus at a tender age came to enjoy a certain decent celebrity in the world of ornithology. At seventeen, still in the University, he was becoming known as a first-rate all-round bird man; he rather looked down on old Fodd at the Natural History Museum who was a beetle man and particularly on Armbuster who was a mere bee man; yes, Armbuster and his bees decidedly wearied Hervey Deyo. As if bees counted!
Something revolutionary happened to him in the spring of his twenty-second year. The mild spring evenings, biology, inexorable Nature conspired against him; his mind began to reach out for contacts with new things outside the world of birds. He made the disturbing discovery that he could be interested in things unfeathered; girls, for example.
He made this discovery at a tea to which he had gone, most reluctantly, with his mother, who was intensely serious about her social duties. He found himself sitting on a divan beside a girl; her hair was blonde and bobbed and she had an attentive little smile. To be polite, he explained to her the essential differences between the European redstart (Phœnicurus Phœnicurus) and its cousin, the American flycatching warbler (Setophaga Ruticilla). As he talked the notion grew on him that teas were not the bore he had thought them. It disconcerted him when the girl rather abruptly left him to join a fattish young man who had just entered. Hervey Deyo could tell at a glance that the newcomer had not the intellect to so much as stuff a lark.
His alert mother spied his lonely state and steered him to another corner and another girl. He sought to fascinate her with an account of the curious circumstance that the male loon (Gavia Immer) has three more bones in his ankle than the female of that specie; he told her this in strictest confidence, for it was the very latest gossip of the world of ornithology. He could not but note that after fifteen minutes her attention seemed to wander. Presently she murmured some vague excuse and slipped away to join a laughing group in another part of the room. He followed her flight with a glum eye.
The group appeared to have as its center the fattish young man and it was growing distinctly hilarious. Hervey Deyo had a pressing, but, he told himself, wholly scientific interest in learning what conversational charm or topic made the fattish young man so much more interesting than himself. He edged his chair within earshot.
The fattish young man was not talking; he appeared to be making a series of odd noises through his nose, varied now and then by throaty bellows.
“Norrrrrrrrrk. Norrrrrk. Wurrrrr. Wurrrrr.”
The trained ear of Hervey Deyo was puzzled; clearly they were not bird noises, yet they had a scientific sound; perhaps the fattish young man was a scientist after all, a mammal man.
“Norrrrrrrrrk. Norrrrrk. Wurrrrr. Wurrrrr.”