117

Concord, Mass
1916

  The inscrutable, addle pated Guinea-hen, thought to be
a female but never certainly identified as such, seemed
undesirous of human notice and hence got little of it. Not
so the Goose who both inspired and welcomed it, being ever
an attractively friendly, sagacious and interesting bird much
liked by everbody [everybody] about the place. When closely approached and
spoken to by anyone familiarly known he would promply [promptly] advance
with glad outcry, slow-flapping wings and sinuous curvings of
head and neck - all alike betokening amicable greeting. It
must be confessed that large greenish eggs which no
other fowl could possibly have laid were sometimes found in
the aviary but that did not happen until general use
of the name "Dick", and of masculine pronouns similarly
applied, had become too firmly established to be 
then discredited or afterwards discontinued, because of any 
such belated evidence of femininity.