"Wonderful, wonderful!" he was admiringly ejaculating. "Behold the amazing instinct implanted by nature. See how the feathered epicure picks and chooses his morning meal!"
"If a 'feathered pickyer' means a black thief as ever was, sir, that bird's well named!" said the housekeeper wrathfully.
At last Mike made his final choice, and, out of pure contrariness, it was the bowl of hot bread and milk prepared for Jinty's breakfast from which he flatly refused to be elbowed away.
"My pretty! Has it snatched the very cup from thy lip!" Mrs. Barbara's indignation boiled over against the bold audacious tyrant so abetted by its master—and hers. "If I'd but my will o' thee, thou thief, I'd flog thee sore!" she added.
"Quoth the raven: never more!"
solemnly edged in the professor, with a ponderous chuckle over his own aptitude which went unapplauded save by himself.
"I want my breakfast, grandpapa," whimpered Jinty.
It was all very funny indeed to witness Mike's reckless charge of destruction over the snowy tablecloth, but, when it came to his calm appropriation of her own breakfast, why, as Mrs. Barbara said, "Flesh and blood couldn't stand it."
"Have a cup of black coffee and some omelette, dearling!" said the professor, who would not have called anybody "darling" for the world. Then the reckless old gentleman proceeded to placidly sort the letters lying on the breakfast-table, comfortably unconscious that little maids "cometh up" on different fare from that of tough old veterans.
"Why, why! Here's a surprise for us all!" Pushing back his spectacles into the very roots of his white hair, the professor stared feebly round on the company, and twiddled in his fingers a sheet of thin foreign paper.