"
"And yet you bought the thing."
"No, I didn't."
"You didn't buy it?"
"No, sir, I didn't buy it. I began by pricing three or four other things
first, so he couldn't know which one to stick the fancy price on to, and
incidentally I thought I would tell him--you'd told me, you remember, how
your accounts of your two birds had warmed him up and melted his
feelings----"
"I didn't tell you. My wife told your wife, and your wife, I----"
"Yes, yes. Well, anyhow, I thought I'd try the same game, so I told him
how I had stuffed a bird once upon a time myself. It was a pigeon, with
every feather as white as snow; a fan-tail. It had belonged to my little
boy who died. I thought it would make such a beautiful emblem at his
funeral, rising with wings outspread, you know, typical of the
resurrection--we buried him from the Sunday-school, you remember. And so I
killed it and wired it and stuffed it myself. It was hard to hang it in a
soaring attitude, owing to its being a fan-tail, but I managed it."
"And you told that to Manouvrier! What did he say?"
"Say? He never so much as cracked a smile. When I'd done he stood so
still, looking at me, that I turned and sort o' stroked the turkey and
said, jestingly, says I, 'How much a pound for this gobbler?'"
"That ought to have warmed him up.
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