| Now there is more to a bluejay than any other animal. He has got more different kinds of feeling. |  |
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Whatever a bluejay feels he can put into language, and not mere commonplace language, but straight out and out book talk, and there is such a command of language. You never saw a bluejay get stuck for a word. He is a vocabularized geyser. |
| Now you must call a jay a bird, and so he is in a measure, because he wears feathers and don't belong to any church, but otherwise he is just as human nature made him. |  |
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A bluejay hasn't any more principle than an ex-congressman,
and he will steal, deceive and betray four times out of five; and as for
the sacredness of an obligation, you cannot scare him in the detail of
principle. He talks the best grammar of all the animals. You may say a
cat talks good grammar. Well, a cat does; but you let a cat get excited,
you let a cat get at pulling fur with another cat on a shed nights and
you will hear grammar.
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A bluejay is human; he has got all a man's faculties
and a man's weakness. He likes especially scandal; he knows when he is
an ass as well as you do.
- "Morals Lecture," 15 July 1895; similar passage in A Tramp Abroad |
 AI images created by Barbara Schmidt |
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