r birds," as they called them. Oddly enough they always found these
rare species a second time, though Mary, because of her
near-sightedness, had to be content with a casual glance at them.

"But what you've seen, you've seen," she said. "I've got to see fifty
birds before June 1st; that doesn't necessarily mean see them so you'll
know them again. Now I shouldn't know the nestle or the shelcuff, but I
can put them down, can't I?"

"Of course," assented Katherine, "a few rare birds like those will make
your list look like something."

The pink-headed euthuma, which came to light on the very last day of
May, interested Mary so much that she told Roberta about it immediately
and Roberta questioned the discoverers. Their accounts were perfectly
consistent.

"Way out on Paradise path, almost to the end, we met a man dashing
around as if he were crazy," explained Betty. "We should have thought he
was an escaped lunatic if we hadn't seen others like him."

"Yes," continued Katherine. "But he acted too much like you to take us
in. So we said we were interested in birds too, and he danced around
some more and said we had come upon a rare specimen. Then he pointed to
the top of an enormous pine-tree----"

"Those rare birds are always in the very tops of trees," put in Mary
eagerly.

"Of course; that's one reason they're rare," went on Betty. "But that
minute it flew into the top of a poplar, and we three pursued it. It was
a beauty."

"And then you came back after me, and it was still there. Tell her how
it was marked," suggested Mary. "Perhaps she knows it under some other
name."

"It had a pink head, of course," said Katherine, "and blue wings."

"Goodness!" exclaimed Roberta suspiciously.

"Don't you mean black wings, Katherine?" asked Betty hastily.

"Did I say blue? I meant black of course. Mary thought they looked blue
and that confused me. And its breast was white with brown marks on it."

"What size was it?" asked Roberta.

Katherine looked doubtful. "What should you say, Mary?"

"Well, it was quite small--about the size of a sparrow or a robin, I
thought."

"They're quite different sizes," said Roberta wearily. "Your old man
must have been color-blind. It couldn't have had a pink head. Who ever
heard of a pink-headed bird?"

"We three are not color-blind," Katherine reminded her. "And then
there's the name." Roberta sighed deeply. The new members of the
Mary-bird club were very unmanageable.

Mean