“A parrot, gentlemen, is the meanest of all creation. People who are acquainted with parrots, and I don’t know that you are, generally admit that there is nothing that can make a parrot ashamed of himself. Now this is a mistake, for I’ve seen a parrot made ashamed of himself, and he was the most conceited parrot that was ever seen outside of Congress. It happened in this way.
“I came home one day and found a parrot in the house. My daughter Mamie had bought him from a sailor who was tramping through the town. Said he had been shipwrecked, and he and the parrot were the only persons saved. He had made up his mind never to part with that bird, but he was so anxious to get to the town where his mother lived that he would sell him for a dollar. So Mamie she buys him, and hangs him up in the parlor and waits for him to talk.
“ASKING THE CAT IF HE HAD EVER SEEN A MOUSE.”
“It turned out that the parrot couldn’t talk anything but Spanish, and very little of that. And he wouldn’t learn a word of English, though my daughter worked over him as if he had been a whole Sunday-school. But one day he all at once began to teach himself English. Invented a sort of Ollendorff way of studying, perhaps because he had heard Mamie studying French that way. He’d begin by saying, ‘Does Polly want a cracker?’ and then he’d go on and ring the changes. For example, just to give you an idea of the system, he’d say, ‘Does Polly want the lead cracker of the plumber or the gold cracker of the candlestick maker?’ and then he’d answer, ‘No, Polly does not want the lead cracker of the plumber nor the gold cracker of the candlestick maker, but the large steel cracker of the blacksmith.’ He used to study in this way three hours every morning and three every afternoon, and never stop for Sundays, being, as I suppose, a Roman Catholic, and not a Sabbath-keeping bird. I never saw a bird so bent on learning a language as this one was, and he fetched it. In three months’ time that parrot could talk English as well as you or I, and a blamed sight better than that waiter who pretends that he talks English. The trouble was the parrot would talk all the time when he was not asleep. My wife is no slouch at talking, but I’ve seen her burst into tears and say, ‘It’s no use, I can’t get in a word edgewise.’ And no more could she. That bird was just talking us deaf, dumb, and blind. The cat, he gave it up at an early stage of the proceedings. The parrot was so personal in his remarks—asking the cat if he had ever seen a mouse in his whole life, and wanting to know who it was that helped him to paint the back fence red the other night, till the cat, after cursing till all was blue, went out of the house and never showed up again. He hadn’t the slightest regard for anybody’s feelings, that bird hadn’t. No parrot ever has.
“He wasn’t content with talking three-fourths of the time, but he had a habit of thinking out loud which was far worse than his conversation. For instance, when young Jones called of an evening on my daughter, the parrot would say, ‘Well, I suppose that young idiot will stay till midnight, and keep the whole house awake as usual.’ Or when the Unitarian minister came to see my wife the parrot would just as likely as not remark, ‘Why don’t he hire a hall if he must preach, instead of coming here and wearing out the furniture?’ Nobody would believe that the parrot made these remarks of his own accord, but insisted that we must have taught them to him. Naturally, folks didn’t like this sort of thing, and after a while hardly anybody came inside our front door.
“And then that bird developed a habit of bragging that was simply disgusting. He would sit up by the hour and brag about his superiority to other birds, and the beauty of his feathers, and his cage, and the gorgeousness of the parlor, and the general meanness of everything except himself and his possessions. He made me so tired that I sometimes wished I were deaf. You see, it was the infernal ignorance of the bird that aggravated me. He didn’t know a thing of the world outside of our parlor; and yet he’d brag and brag till you couldn’t rest.