ns of
time--"this one that seems all red, white, and blue--to what genus of
beasts does he belong? He appeals at once to my patriotism and to my
love of discord in colour schemes."

"That's a cockatoo from Ecuador," said Bibb. "All he has been taught
to say is 'Merry Christmas.' A seasonable bird. He's only seven
dollars; and I'll bet many a human has stuck you for more money by
making the same speech to you."

And then Bibb laughed suddenly and loudly.

"That bird," he explained, "reminds me. He's got his dates mixed.
He ought to be saying '_E pluribus unum_,' to match his feathers,
instead of trying to work the Santa Claus graft. It reminds me of the
time me and Liverpool Sam got our ideas of things tangled up on the
coast of Costa Rica on account of the weather and other phenomena to
be met with in the tropics.

"We were, as it were, stranded on that section of the Spanish main
with no money to speak of and no friends that should be talked about
either. We had stoked and second-cooked ourselves down there on a
fruit steamer from New Orleans to try our luck, which was discharged,
after we got there, for lack of evidence. There was no work suitable
to our instincts; so me and Liverpool began to subsist on the red rum
of the country and such fruit as we could reap where we had not sown.
It was an alluvial town, called Soledad, where there was no harbour
or future or recourse. Between steamers the town slept and drank rum.
It only woke up when there were bananas to ship. It was like a man
sleeping through dinner until the dessert.

"When me and Liverpool got so low down that the American consul
wouldn't speak to us we knew we'd struck bed rock.

"We boarded with a snuff-brown lady named Chica, who kept a rum-shop
and a ladies' and gents' restaurant in a street called the _calle
de los_ Forty-seven Inconsolable Saints. When our credit played
out there, Liverpool, whose stomach overshadowed his sensations of
_noblesse oblige_, married Chica. This kept us in rice and fried
plantain for a month; and then Chica pounded Liverpool one morning
sadly and earnestly for fifteen minutes with a casserole handed down
from the stone age, and we knew that we had out-welcomed our liver.
That night we signed an engagement with Don Jaime McSpinosa, a hybrid
banana fancier of the place, to work on his fruit preserves nine miles
out of town. We had to do it or be reduced to sea water and broken
doses of feed and slumber.

"Now, spe