"Yes," said McTavish, "I guessed what was up, and told my man to go slower. It wasn't the psychological moment for either of us to break our necks, was it?" "No; but I promised the man ten pound, McTavish--and I hay'na got it." "Ten pounds ought to have a certain purchasing power," said he. "Then shut your eyes," she commanded. "And after all," she said, "you'll be _The_ McTavish, won't you?" "I will not," he said. "Do you think I'm going to take you back to America with me Saturday, and have all my friends in New York point their fingers at me, and call me--_The_?" THE PARROT He had been so buffeted by fortune, through various climates and various applications of his many-sidedness, that when I first met Leslie it was difficult to believe him a fellow countryman. His speech had been welded by the influence of alien languages to a choice cosmopolitanism. His skin, thick and brown from blazing sunshines, puckered monkey-like about his blue, blinking eyes. He never hurried. He was going to Hong-Kong to build part of a dry-dock for the English Government, he said, but his ambitions had dwindled to owning a farm somewhere in New York State and having a regular menagerie of birds and animals. His most enthusiastic moments of conversation were in arguing and anecdotalizing the virtues and ratiocinations of animals and birds. The monkey, he said, was next to man the most clever, but was inferior to the elephant in that he had no sense of right or wrong. Furthermore, monkeys were immodest. Next came certain breeds of dogs. Very low in the scale he placed horses; very high, parrots.