ns.

Fellacher kept the parrot a long time. He always promised that it would
be ready for the following week; after six months he announced the
shipment of a case, and that was the end of it. Really, it seemed as
if Loulou would never come back to his home. "They have stolen him,"
thought Felicite.

Finally he arrived, sitting bold upright on a branch which could be
screwed into a mahogany pedestal, with his foot in the air, his head on
one side, and in his beak a nut which the naturalist, from love of the
sumptuous, had gilded. She put him in her room.

This place, to which only a chosen few were admitted, looked like a
chapel and a second-hand shop, so filled was it with devotional and
heterogeneous things. The door could not be opened easily on account of
the presence of a large wardrobe. Opposite the window that looked out
into the garden, a bull's-eye opened on the yard; a table was placed by
the cot and held a wash-basin, two combs, and a piece of blue soap in
a broken saucer. On the walls were rosaries, medals, a number of Holy
Virgins, and a holy-water basin made out of a cocoanut; on the bureau,
which was covered with a napkin like an altar, stood the box of
shells that Victor had given her; also a watering-can and a balloon,
writing-books, the engraved geography and a pair of shoes; on the
nail which held the mirror, hung Virginia's little plush hat! Felicite
carried this sort of respect so far that she even kept one of Monsieur's
old coats. All the things which Madame Aubain discarded, Felicite begged
for her own room. Thus, she had artificial flowers on the edge of the
bureau, and the picture of the Comte d'Artois in the recess of the
window. By means of a board, Loulou was set on a portion of the chimney
which advanced into the room. Every morning when she awoke, she saw
him in the dim light of dawn and recalled bygone days and the smallest
details of insignificant actions, without any sense of bitterness or
grief.

As she was unable to communicate with people, she lived in a sort of
somnambulistic torpor. The processions of Corpus-Christi Day seemed to
wake her up. She visited the neighbours to beg for candlesticks and mats
so as to adorn the temporary altars in the street.

In church, she always gazed at the Holy Ghost, and noticed that there
was something about it that resembled a parrot. The likenesses appeared
even more striking on a coloured picture by Espinal, representing the
baptism of our Sa