My Literary Zoo
Date: 2020-04-08T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Pets in literature; Animals in literature

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Title: My Literary Zoo

Author: Kate Sanborn

Release date: April 8, 2020 [eBook #61790]
Most recently updated: October 17, 2024

Language: English

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MY LITERARY ZOO

KATE SANBORN’S BOOKS.

Abandoning an Adopted Farm. 12mo. Cloth, 75 cents.

“Every page is rich with its amusing and entertaining stories and references.”—Boston Herald.

“Can not fail to be of the utmost interest to any and all who have spent any time in the country and observed the ways of country people. Miss Sanborn is simply inimitable in her ability to catch the humorous in what is passing about her, and in setting it down so that others can enjoy it.”—Cleveland World.

Adopting an Abandoned Farm. 16mo. Boards, 50 cents.

“‘Adopting an Abandoned Farm’ has as much laugh to the square inch as any book we have read this many a day.”—Boston Sunday Herald.

“Miss Kate Sanborn has made a name and place for herself beside the immortal Sam Slick, and has made Gooseville, Connecticut, as illustrious as Slickville in Onion County, of the same State.”—The Critic.

“If any one wants an hour’s entertainment for a warm sunny day on the piazza, or a cold wet day by a log fire, this is the book that will furnish it.”—New York Observer.

A Truthful Woman in Southern California. 12mo. Cloth, 75 cents.

“Miss Sanborn is certainly a very bright writer, and when a book bears her name it is safe to buy it and put it aside for delectation when a leisure hour comes along. This bit of a volume is enticing in every page, and the weather seemed not to be so intolerably hot while we were reading it.”—New York Herald.

“Her descriptions are inimitable, and their brilliancy is enhanced with quaint and witty observations and brief historical allusions.... Valuable information and richly entertaining descriptions are admirably blended in this book.”—Boston Home Journal.

New York: D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue.

My Literary Zoo

By

Kate Sanborn

Author of Adopting an Abandoned Farm, Abandoning an Adopted Farm, A Truthful Woman in Southern California, Etc.

New York
D. Appleton and Company
1896

Copyright, 1896,

By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

CONTENTS.

| PAGE
Everybody’s pets | 1
Devoted to dogs | 19
Cats | 75
All sorts | 105

MY LITERARY ZOO.

EVERYBODY’S PETS.

The world’s not seen him yet,

Who has not loved a pet.

Not the human pets of noted persons, such as Walter Scott’s Pet Marjorie, that winsome, precocious little witch, so loved by the “Wizard of the North,” or Bettina von Arnim, the eccentric, brilliant girl, whose rhapsodic idolatry was placidly encouraged by the great Goethe, but the dumb favourites of distinguished men and women.

I must devote a few pages to the various tributes to insects, birds, and animals, written about with love, pity, or admiration, yet not as pets, as Burns’s address to the Mousie:

I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
And justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor earth-born companion
And fellow-mortal;

and another to an unspeakable insect that rhymes with mouse. We remember, too, his essay on Inhuman Man, as he saw a wounded hare limp by. The fly has often been honoured in prose or verse, but we all like best the benevolent speech of dear Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy to the overgrown bluebottle, which had buzzed about his nose and tormented him cruelly during dinner, and which, after infinite attempts, he had caught at last. “I’ll not hurt thee,” said Uncle Toby; “I’ll not hurt a hair of thy head. Go,” said he, lifting up the window—“go, poor devil, get thee gone. Why should I hurt thee? This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.”

Tristram adds, “The lesson then imprinted has never since been an hour out of mind, and I often think that I owe one half of my philanthropy to that one accidental impression.”

The Greek grasshopper must have been a wonderful creature, a sacred object, and spoken of as a charming songster. When Socrates and Phædrus came to the fountain shaded by the palm tree, where they had their famous discourse, Socrates spoke of “the choir of grasshoppers.”

Another makes the insect say to a rustic who had captured him:

Me, the Nymphs’ wayside minstrel, whose sweet note

O’er sultry hill is heard, and shady grove to float.

Still another sings how a grasshopper took the place of a broken string on his lyre and “filled the cadence due.”

This Pindaric grasshopper seems quite unlike the ravaging locust of the West. Burroughs suggests that he should be brought to our country, as some one is trying to introduce the English lark.

Emerson devotes a poem to the burly dozing bumblebee, a genuine optimist:

Wiser far than human seer,
Yellow-breeched philosopher;
Seeing only what is fair,
Sipping only what is sweet.

A delightful volume could be compiled on the literature of bird life, from the cuckoo, the earliest songster honoured by the poets, to Matthew Arnold’s canary. Passing on to animals, the Lake poets were interested to a noticeable degree in these humble companions. In Peter Bell, a poem that proved Wordsworth’s theories about poetry to be untenable, the ass is the hero, a veritable preacher, as in the days of Balaam. And Coleridge, greatly to the amusement of his critics, addressed some lines To a Young Ass, its Mother being tethered near it:

How askingly its footsteps hither tend!

It seems to say, And have I then one friend?

Innocent foal! thou poor despised forlorn!

I hail thee brother, spite of the fool’s scorn!

And fain would take thee with me, in the dell

Of peace and mild equality to dwell.

Where Toil shall call the charmer Health his bride,

And Laughter tickle Plenty’s ribless side!

How thou wouldst toss thy heels in gamesome play,

And frisk about as lamb or kitten gay!
Yea! and more musically sweet to me
Thy dissonant harsh bray of joy would be,
Than warbled melodies that soothe to rest
The aching of pale fashion’s vacant breast.

Wordsworth also wrote on The White Doe of Rylstone and The Pet Lamb.

Southey paid his respects to The Pig and a Dancing Bear:

Alas, poor Bruin! How he foots the pole,
And waddles round it with unwieldy steps
Swaying from side to side. The dancing master
Hath had as profitless a pupil in him
As when he tortured my poor toes

To minuet grace, and made them move like clock-work

In musical obedience.

After sympathizing with his “piteous plight” he draws a moral for the advocates of the slave trade.

He also addressed poems to The Bee and A Spider; the latter must be given entire, it is so strong and original in its comparisons:

Spider! thou needst not run in fear about
To shun my curious eyes;
I won’t humanely crush thy bowels out
Lest thou should eat the flies;
Nor will I roast thee with a damned delight,
Thy strange instinctive fortitude to see,
For there is One who might
One day roast me.

Weaver of snares, thou emblemest the ways
Of Satan, sire of lies;
Hell’s huge black spider, for mankind he lays
His toils, as thou for flies.
When Betty’s busy eye runs round the room,
Woe to that nice geometry, if seen!
But where is he whose broom
The earth shall clean?

Thou busy labourer! one resemblance more
May yet the verse prolong,
For, spider, thou art like the poet poor,
Whom thou hast helped in song.
Both busily our needful food to win

We work as Nature taught, with ceaseless pains,

Thy bowels thou dost spin,

I spin my brains.

You remember that the pertinacity with which a spider renewed his exertions after failing six times to fix his net, roused Bruce to perseverance and success.

Cackling geese saved Rome, and Caligula shod his favourite horse with gold and nominated him for vice consul, as he considered him vastly superior to the men who aspired to that honourable position. Virgil amused his leisure hours with a gnat. Homer made pets of frogs and mice.

The horse has been dearly loved by many famous people who have not been ashamed to own it.

Mr. Everett once told a pathetic anecdote of Edmund Burke, that “in the decline of his life, when living in retirement on his farm at Beaconsfield, the rumour went up to London that he had gone mad and went round his park kissing his cows and horses. His only son had died not long before, leaving a petted horse which had been turned into the park and treated as a privileged favourite. Mr. Burke in his morning walks would often stop to caress the favourite animal. On one occasion the horse recognised Mr. Burke from a distance, and coming nearer and nearer, eyed him with the most pleading look of recognition, and said as plainly as words could have said, ‘I have lost him too!’ and then the poor dumb beast deliberately laid his head upon Mr. Burke’s bosom. Overwhelmed by the tenderness of the animal, expressed in the mute eloquence of holy Nature’s universal language, the illustrious statesman for a moment lost his self-possession and clasping his arms around his son’s favourite animal, lifted up that voice which had caused the arches of Westminster Hall to echo the noblest strains that sounded within them, and wept aloud. Burke is gone; but, sir, so hold me Heaven, if I were called upon to designate the event or the period in Burke’s life that would best sustain a charge of insanity, it would not be when, in a gush of the holiest and purest feeling that ever stirred the human heart, he wept aloud on the neck of a dead son’s favourite horse.”

Lord Erskine composed some lines to the memory of a beloved pony, Jack, who had carried him on the home circuit when he was first called to the bar, and could not afford any more sumptuous mode of travelling:

Poor Jack! thy master’s friend when he was poor,

Whose heart was faithful and whose step was sure!

Should prosperous life debauch my erring heart,

And whispering pride repel the patriot’s part;

Should my foot falter at ambition’s shrine
And for mean lucre quit the path divine,
Then may I think of thee—when I was poor—

Whose heart was faithful and whose step was sure.

The following address of an Arab to his horse is translated from the Arabic by Bayard Taylor:

Come, my beauty! come, my desert darling!

On my shoulder lay thy glossy head.

Fear not, though the barley sack be empty,

Here’s the half of Hassan’s scanty bread.

Bend thy forehead now to take my kisses,

Lift in love thy dark and splendid eye.

Thou art glad when Hassan mounts the saddle,

Thou art proud he owns thee; so am I.

We have seen Damascus, O my beauty!

And the splendour of the pashas there;

What’s their pomp and riches? Why, I would not

Take them for a handful of thy hair!

Thou shalt have thy share of dates, my beauty,

And thou know’st my water skin is free.

Drink, and welcome; for the springs are distant,

And my strength and safety are in thee.

Bayard Taylor loved and appreciated animals, and in an article in the Atlantic Monthly of February, 1877, on Studies of Animal Nature, he says: “If Darwin’s theory should be true, it will not degrade man; it will simply raise the whole animal world into dignity, leaving man as far in advance as he is at present.”

He adds: “I have always had a great respect for animals, and have endeavoured to treat them with the consideration which I think they deserve. They have quick perceptions, and know when to be confiding or reticent. I have learned no better way to gain their confidence than to ask myself, If I were such or such an animal, how should I wish to be treated by man? and to act upon that suggestion. Since the key to the separate languages has been lost on both sides, the higher intelligence must condescend to open some means of communication with the lower.

“The zoölogists unfortunately rarely trouble themselves to do this; they are more interested in the skull of an elephant, the thigh-bone of a bird, or the dorsal fin of a fish, than in the intelligence or rudimentary moral sense of the creature. But the former field is open to all laymen, and nothing but a stubborn traditional contempt for our slaves or our hunted enemies in the animal world has held us back from a truer knowledge of them.

“In the first place, animals have much more capacity to understand human speech than is generally supposed. Some years ago, seeing the hippopotamus in Barnum’s Museum looking very stolid and dejected, I spoke to him in English, but he did not even move his eyes. Then I went to the opposite corner of the cage and said in Arabic: ‘I know you; come here to me.’ He instantly turned his head toward me. I repeated the words, and thereupon he came to the corner where I was standing, pressed his huge, ungainly head against the bars of the cage, and looked in my face with a touching delight while I stroked his muzzle. I have two or three times found a lion who recognised the same language, and the expression of his eyes for an instant seemed positively human.”

He also tells his experience with a tame lioness in Africa. “In a short time we were very good friends. She knew me, and always seemed glad to see me, though I sometimes teased her a little by getting astride of her back, or sitting upon her when she was lying down. When she was in a playful mood she would come to meet me as far as the rope would let her, get her forepaws around my leg and then take it in her mouth, as if she were going to eat me up. I was a little alarmed when she did this for the first time; but I soon saw that she was merely in play, and had no thought of hurting me, so I took her by the ears and slapped her sides, until at last she lay down and licked my hand. Her tongue was as coarse as a nutmeg grater, and my hand felt as if the skin was being rasped off.

“There was also a leopard in the garden with which I used to play a great deal, but which I never loved so well as the lioness. He was smaller and more active, and soon learned to jump upon my shoulders when I stooped down, or to climb up the tree to which he was tied, whenever I commanded him. But he was not so affectionate as the lioness, and sometimes forgot to draw in his claws when he played, so that he not only tore my clothing, but scratched my hands. I still have the marks of one of his teeth on the back of my right hand.

“My old lioness was never rough, and I have frequently, when she had stretched out to take a nap, sat upon her back for half an hour at a time, smoking my pipe or reading.

“I assure you I was very sorry to part with her, and when I saw her for the last time one moonlight night, I gave her a good hug and an affectionate kiss. She would have kissed me back if her mouth had not been too large; but she licked my hand to show that she loved me, then laid her big head upon the ground and went to sleep.

“Dear old lioness! I wonder if you ever think of me. I wonder if you would know me, should we ever see each other again.”

If our late minister to Berlin, the accomplished poet, linguist, and cosmopolitan, could give his attention to animals as friends and companions, there can be nothing belittling in reading their praises as said or sung by those whom we all delight to honour.

Hamerton, indeed, makes a comparison in which we come out but second best. He says: “How much weariness has there been in the human race during the last fifty years, because the human race can not stop politically where it was, and, finding no rest, is pushed to a strange future that the wisest look forward to gravely, as certainly very dark and probably very dangerous! Meanwhile, have the bees suffered any political uneasiness? have they doubted the use of royalty or begrudged the cost of their queen? Have those industrious republicans, the ants, gone about uneasily seeking after a sovereign? Has the eagle grown weary of his isolation and sought strength in the practice of socialism? Has the dog become too enlightened to endure any longer his position as man’s humble friend, and contemplated a canine union for mutual protection against masters? No; the great principles of these existences are superior to change, and that which man is perpetually seeking—a political order in perfect harmony with his condition—the brute has inherited with his instincts.”

Cowper, in The Task, devotes several pages to the proper treatment of animals, and expresses his admiration for their many noble qualities:

Distinguished much by reason, and still more
By our capacity of grace divine,
From creatures, that exist but for our sake,
Which, having served us, perish, we are held
Accountable; and God some future day,
Will reckon with us roundly for the abuse
Of what he deems no mean or trivial trust.
Superior as we are, they yet depend
Not more on human help than we on theirs.

Their strength, or speed, or vigilance, were given

In aid of our defects. In some are found
Such teachable and apprehensive parts,
That man’s attainments in his own concerns,

Matched with the expertness of the brutes in theirs,

Are ofttimes vanquished and thrown far behind.

Some show that nice sagacity of smell,
And read with such discernment, in the port
And figure of the man, his secret aim,
That oft we owe our safety to a skill

We could not teach, and must despair to learn.

Bryant, in his well-known Lines to a Waterfowl, has a striking thought:

... He who from zone to zone

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,

In the long way that I must tread alone,

Will lead my steps aright.

BOW-WOW-WOW!

The dogge forsaketh not his master; no, not when he is starcke dead.—Dr. Caius.

Dog with the pensive hazel eyes,
Shaggy coat, or feet of tan,
What do you think when you look so wise
Into the face of your fellow, man?
—W. C. Olmsted.

DEVOTED TO DOGS.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.—George Eliot.

Literature, history, and biography are full to overflowing of instances of affection between dogs and their owners. Remember the dog Argus, which died of joy on the return of his master Ulysses after twenty years’ absence. The story is touchingly told in Homer’s Odyssey:

“As he draws near the gates of his own palace, he espies, dying of old age, disease, and neglect, his dog Argus—the companion of many a long chase in happier days. His instinct at once detects his old master, even through the disguise lent by the goddess of wisdom. Before he sees him he knows his voice and step, and raises his ears—

And when he marked Odysseus in the way,

And could no longer to his lord come near,

Fawned with his tail and drooped in feeble play

His ears. Odysseus, turning, wiped a tear.”

It is poor Argus’s last effort, and the old hound turns and dies—

Just having seen Odysseus in the twentieth year.

Egyptians held the dog in adoration as the representative of one of the celestial signs, and the Indians considered him one of the sacred forms of their deities. The dog is placed at the feet of women in monuments, to symbolize affection and fidelity; and many of the Crusaders are represented with their feet on a dog, to show that they followed the standard of the Lord as a dog follows the footsteps of his master. “Man,” said Burns, “is the god of the dog”—knows nothing higher to reverence and obey. Kings and queens have found their most faithful friends among dogs. Frederick the Great allowed his elegant furniture at Potsdam to be nearly ruined by his dogs, who jumped upon the satin chairs and slept cosily on the luxurious sofas, and quite a cemetery may still be seen devoted to his pets. The pretty spaniel belonging to Mary Queen of Scots deserves honourable mention. He loved his ill-starred mistress when her human friends had forsaken her; nestled close by her side at the execution, and had to be forced away from her bleeding body. One of the prettiest pictures of the Princess of Wales is taken with a tiny spaniel in her arms.

Before going further, just recall some of the most famous dogs of mythology, literature, and life, simply giving their names for want of space:

Arthur’s dog Cavall.

Dog of Catherine de’ Medicis, Phœbê, a lapdog.

Cuthullin’s dog Luath, a swift-footed hound.

Dora’s dog Jip.

Douglas’s dog Luffra, from The Lady of the Lake.

Fingal’s dog Bran.

Landseer’s dog Brutus, painted as The Invader of the Larder.

Llewellyn’s dog Gelert.

Lord Lurgan’s dog Master McGrath: presented at court by the express desire of Queen Victoria.

Maria’s dog Silvio, in Sterne’s Sentimental Journey.

Punch’s dog Toby.

Sir Walter Scott’s dogs Maida, Camp, Hamlet.

Dog of the Seven Sleepers, Katmir.

The famous Mount St. Bernard dog, which saved forty human beings, was named Barry. His stuffed skin is preserved in the museum at Berne.

Sir Isaac Newton’s dog, who by overturning a candle destroyed much precious manuscript, was named Diamond.

The ancient Xantippus caused his dog to be interred on an eminence near the sea, which has ever since retained his name, Cynossema. There are even legends of nations that have had a dog for their king. It is said that barking is not a natural faculty, but is acquired through the dog’s desire to talk with man. In a state of nature, dogs simply whine and howl.

When Alexander encountered Diogĕnês the cynic, the young Macedonian king introduced himself with the words, “I am Alexander, surnamed ‘the Great.’” To which the philosopher replied, “And I am Diogĕnês, surnamed ‘the Dog.’” The Athenians raised to his memory a pillar of Parian marble, surmounted with a dog, and bearing the following inscription:

“Say, dog, what guard you in that tomb?”

A dog. “His name?” Diogĕnês. “From far?”

Sinopé. “He who made a tub his home?”

The same; now dead, among the stars a star.

What man or woman worth remembering but has loved at least one dog? Hamerton, in speaking of the one dog—the special pet and dear companion of every boy and many a girl, from Ulysses to Bismarck—observes that “the comparative shortness of the lives of dogs is the only imperfection in the relation between them and us. If they had lived to threescore and ten, man and dog might have travelled through life together; but as it is, we must have either a succession of affections, or else, when the first is buried in its early grave, live in a chill condition of dog-lessness.” I thank him for coining that compound word. Almost every one might, like Grace Greenwood and Gautier, write a History of my Pets, and make a most readable book. Bismarck honoured one of his dogs, Nero, with a formal funeral. The body was borne on the shoulders of eight workmen dressed in black to a grave in the park. He had been poisoned, and a large reward was offered for the discovery of the assassin. The prince, statesman, diplomatist, does not believe in dog-lessness, and gives to another hound, equally devoted, the same intense affection. “My dog—where is my dog?” are his first words on alighting from a railway, as Sultan must travel second class. He even mixes the food for his dogs with his own hands, believing it will make them love him the more.

Another Nero was the special companion of Mrs. Carlyle, a little white dog, who had for his playmate a black cat, whose name was Columbine, and Carlyle says that during breakfast, whenever the dining-room door was opened, Nero and Columbine would come waltzing into the room in the height of joy. He went with his mistress everywhere, led by a chain for fear of thieves. For eleven years he cheered her life at Craigenputtock, “the loneliest nook in Britain.”

Nero’s death was a tragical one. In October, 1859, while walking out with the maid one evening, a butcher’s cart driving furiously round a sharp corner ran over his throat. He was not killed on the spot, although his mistress says “he looked killed enough at first.” The poor fellow was put into a warm bath, wrapped up in flannels, and left to die. The morning found him better, however; he was able to wag his tail in response to the caresses of his mistress.

Little by little he recovered the use of himself, but it was ten days before he could bark.

He lived four months after this, docile, affectionate, loyal up to his last hour, but weak and full of pain. The doctor was obliged at last to give him prussic acid. They buried him at the top of the garden in Cheyne Row, and planted cowslips round his grave, and his loving mistress placed a stone tablet, with name and date, to mark the last resting place of her blessed dog.

“I could not have believed,” writes Carlyle in the Memorials, “my grief then and since would have been the twentieth part of what it was—nay, that the want of him would have been to me other than a riddance. Our last midnight walk together—for he insisted on trying to come—January 31st, is still painful to my thought. Little dim white speck of life, of love, fidelity, and feeling, girdled by the darkness of night eternal.”

Is not that a delightful revelation of tenderness in the heart of the grand old growler, biographer, critic, historian, essayist, prophet, whom most people feared? I like to read it again and again.

The selfish, cynical Horace Walpole sat up night after night with his dying Rosette. He wrote: “Poor Rosette has suffered exquisitely; you may believe I have too,” and honoured her with this epitaph:

Sweetest roses of the year
Strew around my Rose’s bier.
Calmly may the dust repose
Of my pretty, faithful Rose;
And if yon cloud-topped hill behind
This frame dissolved, this breath resigned,
Some happier isle, some humbler heaven,
Be to my trembling wishes given,
Admitted to that equal sky
May sweet Rose bear me company.

And of the dog Touton, left him by Madame du Deffand, he said: “It is incredible how fond I am of it; but I have no occasion to brag of my dogmanity” (another expressive word). He said, “A dog, though a flatterer, is still a friend.” Byron, that egotistic, misanthropic genius, composed an epitaph on Boatswain, his favourite dog, whose death threw the moody poet into deepest melancholy. The dog’s grave is to the present day shown among the conspicuous objects at Newstead. The poet, in one of his impulsive moments, gave orders in a provision of his will—ultimately however, cancelled—that his own body should be buried by the side of Boatswain, as his truest and only friend. This noble animal was seized with madness, and so little was his lordship aware of the fact, that at the beginning of the attack he more than once, during the paroxysms, wiped away the dreaded saliva from his mouth. After his death Lord Byron wrote to his friend Mr. Hodges: “Boatswain is dead. He died in a state of madness on the 18th, after suffering much, yet retaining all the gentleness of his nature to the last, never attempting to do the least injury to any one near him. I have now lost everything excepting old Murray.” Visitors to his old estate will find a marked monument with this tribute:

NEAR THIS SPOT
ARE DEPOSITED THE REMAINS OF
ONE THAT POSSESSED BEAUTY, WITHOUT VANITY,
STRENGTH, WITHOUT INSOLENCE,
COURAGE, WITHOUT FEROCITY,

AND ALL THE VIRTUES OF MAN, WITHOUT HIS VICES.

THIS PRAISE, WHICH WOULD BE
UNMEANING FLATTERY
IF INSCRIBED OVER HUMAN ASHES,
IS BUT A JUST TRIBUTE
TO THE MEMORY OF BOATSWAIN, A DOG,
WHO WAS BORN IN NEWFOUNDLAND, MAY, 1803,
AND DIED
AT NEWSTEAD ABBEY, NOVEMBER 18, 1808.

Epitaph.

When some proud son of man returns to earth
Unknown to glory, but upheld by birth,
The sculptor’s art exhausts the pomp of woe,
And storied urns record who rests below;
When all is done, upon the tomb is seen

Not what he was, but what he should have been.

But the poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, the foremost to defend.
Whose honest heart is still his master’s own,

Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,

Unhonoured falls, unnoticed all his worth,
Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth;
While man, vain insect, hopes to be forgiven,
And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.
O man, thou feeble tenant of an hour,
Debased by slavery or corrupt by power,

Who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust,

Degraded mass of animated dust.

Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,

Thy smiles hypocrisy, thy words deceit.

By Nature vile, ennobled but by name,

Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.

Ye who perchance behold this simple urn

Pass on, it honours none you wish to mourn;

To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise:

I never knew but one, and here he lies.

Walter Scott’s dogs had an extraordinary fondness for him. Swanston declares that he had to stand by, when they were leaping and fawning about him, to beat them off lest they should knock him down. One day, when he and Swanston were in the armory, Maida (the dog which now lies at his feet in the monument at Edinburgh), being outside, had peeped in through the window, a beautifully painted one, and the instant she got a glance of her beloved master she bolted right through it and at him. Lady Scott, starting at the crash, exclaimed, “O gracious, shoot her!” But Scott, caressing her with the utmost coolness, said, “No, no, mamma, though she were to break every window at Abbotsford.” He was engaged for an important dinner party on the day his dog Camp died, but sent word that he could not go, “on account of the death of a dear old friend.” He tried early one morning to make the fire of peat burn, and after many efforts succeeded in some degree. At this moment one of the dogs, dripping from a plunge in the lake, scratched and whined at the window. Sir Walter let the “puir creature” in, who, coming up before the little fire, shook his shaggy hide, sending a perfect shower bath over the fire and over a great table of loose manuscripts. The tender-hearted author, eying the scene with his usual serenity, said slowly, “O dear, ye’ve done a great deal of mischief!” This equanimity is only equalled by Sir Isaac Newton’s exclamation, now, alas! pronounced a fiction, “O Diamond, Diamond, little dost thou know the injury thou hast done!”

“The wisest dog I ever had,” said Scott, “was what is called the bulldog terrier. I taught him to understand a great many words, insomuch that I am positive that the communication betwixt the canine species and ourselves might be greatly enlarged. Camp once bit the baker who was bringing bread to the family. I beat him and explained the enormity of the offence, after which, to the last moment of his life, he never heard the least allusion to the story, in whatever voice or tone it was mentioned, without getting up and retiring to the darkest corner of the room with great appearance of distress. Then if you said, ‘The baker was well paid,’ or ‘The baker was not hurt, after all,’ Camp came forth from his hiding place, capered and barked and rejoiced. When he was unable, toward the end of his life, to attend me when on horseback, he used to watch for my return, and the servant would tell him ‘his master was coming down the hill’ or ‘through the moor,’ and, although he did not use any gesture to explain his meaning, Camp was never known to mistake him, but either went out at the front to go up the hill or at the back to get down to the moorside. He certainly had a singular knowledge of spoken language.”

Once when the great novelist was sitting for his picture he exclaimed, “I am as tired of the operation as old Maida, who has been so often sketched that he got up and walked off with signs of loathing whenever he saw an artist unfurl his paper and handle his brushes!”

It is well known that a dog instantly discerns a friend from an enemy; in fact, he seems to know all those who are friendly to his race. There are few things more touching in the life of this great man than the fact that, when he walked in the streets of Edinburgh, nearly every dog he met came and fawned on him, wagged his tail at him, and thus showed his recognition of the friend of his race.

Àpropos of understanding what is said to them, Bayard Taylor says, “I know of nothing more moving, indeed semi-tragic, than the yearning helplessness in the face of a dog who understands what is said to him and can not answer.”

Walter Savage Landor, irascible, conceited, tempestuous, had a deep affection for dogs, as well as all other dumb creatures, that was interesting. “Of all the Louis Quatorze rhymesters I tolerate La Fontaine only, for I never see an animal, unless it be a parrot, a monkey, or a pug dog, or a serpent, that I do not converse with it either openly or secretly.”

The story of the noble martyr Gellert, who risked his own life for his master’s child, only to be suspected and slain by the hand he loved so well, is perhaps too familiar to be repeated, and yet I can not resist Spenser’s version:

The huntsman missed his faithful hound; he did not respond to horn or cry. But at last as Llewelyn “homeward hied” the dog bounded to greet him, smeared with gore. On entering the house he found his child’s couch also stained with blood, and the infant nowhere to be seen. Believing Gellert had devoured the boy, he plunged his sword in his side, but soon discovered the cherub alive and rosy, while beneath the couch, gaunt and tremendous, a wolf torn and killed:

Ah, what was then Llewelyn’s woe!

Best of thy kind, adieu.

The frantic blow which laid thee low

This heart shall ever rue.

And now a gallant tomb they raise,
With costly sculpture decked;
And marbles storied with his praise
Poor Gellert’s bones protect.

There never could the spearman pass
Or forester unmoved;
There oft the tear-besprinkled grass
Llewelyn’s sorrow proved.

And there he hung his horn and spear,
And there, as evening fell,
In fancy’s ear he oft would hear
Poor Gellert’s dying yell.

And till great Snowdon’s rocks grow old,
And cease the storm to brave,
The consecrated spot shall hold
The name of “Gellert’s Grave.”

Dr. John Brown’s exquisite prose poem of Rab and his Friends is as lasting a memorial to that dog as any built of granite or marble. The dog is emphatically the central figure, the hero of the story. The author sat for his picture with Rab by his side, and we are told that his interest in a half-blind and aged pet was evinced in the very last hours of his life. The dog has figured as the real attraction in several novels, and Ouida lets Puck tell his own story. Mrs. Stowe devoted one volume to Stories about our Dogs, and wrote also A Dog’s Mission. Matthew Arnold had many pets, and not only loved them in life, but has given them immortality by his appreciative tributes to dogs, and cat and canary. Here are two dog requiems:

Geist’s Grave.

Four years, and didst thou stay above

The ground, which hides thee now, but four?

And all that life, and all that love,

Were crowded Geist, into no more.

That loving heart, that patient soul,
Had they indeed no longer span
To run their course and reach their goal,
And read their homily to man?

Kaiser Dead. April 6, 1887.

Kai’s bracelet tail, Kai’s busy feet,

Were known to all the village street.

“What, poor Kai dead?” say all I meet;

“A loss indeed.”

Oh for the croon, pathetic, sweet,

Of Robin’s reed!

Six years ago I brought him down,
A baby dog, from London town;
Round his small throat of black and brown
A ribbon blue,
And touched by glorious renown
A dachshund true.

His mother most majestic dame,
Of blood unmixed, from Potsdam came,
And Kaiser’s race we deemed the same—
No lineage higher.
And so he bore the imperial name;
But ah, his sire!

Soon, soon the day’s conviction bring:
The collie hair, the collie swing,
The tail’s indomitable ring,
The eye’s unrest—
The case was clear; a mongrel thing
Kai stood confest.

But all those virtues which commend
The humbler sort who serve and tend,
Were thine in store, thou faithful friend.
What sense, what cheer,
To us declining tow’rd our end,
A mate how dear!

Thine eye was bright, thy coat it shone;
Thou hadst thine errands off and on;
In joy thy last morn flew; anon
A fit. All’s over;
And thou art gone where Geist hath gone,
And Toss and Rover.

Well, fetch his graven collar fine,
And rub the steel and make it shine,
And leave it round thy neck to twine,
Kai, in thy grave.
There of thy master keep that sign
And this plain stave.

Miss Cobbe is a devoted, outspoken friend of all animals. She says: “I have, indeed, always felt much affection for dogs—that is to say, for those who exhibit the true dog character, which is far from being the case with every canine creature. Their sageness, their joyousness, their transparent little wiles, their caressing and devoted affection, are to me more winning—even, I may say, more really and intensely human (in the sense in which a child is human)—than the artificial, cold, and selfish characters one meets too often in the guise of ladies and gentlemen.”

She had a fluffy white dog she was extremely fond of, and has written several chapters on dogs, kindness to animals, the horrors of vivisection, etc. Read False Hearts and True, The Confessions of a Lost Dog, and Science in Excelsis, and you will realize how she appreciates the rights and the noble traits of the brute creation, and how her own great heart has gone out to her pets. She closes one article, Dogs whom I have Met, with these words: “One thing I think must be clear: until a man has learned to feel for all his sentient fellow-creatures, whether in human or in brute form, of his own class and sex and country, or of another, he has not yet ascended the first step toward true civilization, nor applied the first lesson from the love of God.”

Edward Jesse, in his book, now rare and hard to obtain, on dogs, says, “Histories are more full of samples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.” A French writer declares that, excepting women, there is nothing on earth so agreeable or so necessary to the comfort of man as the dog. Think of the shepherd, his flock collected by his indefatigable dog, who guards both them and his master’s cottage at night; satisfied with a slight caress and coarsest food. The dog performs the service of a horse in more northern regions, while in Cuba and other hot countries is the terror of the runaway negroes. In destruction of wild beasts or the less dangerous stag, or in attacking the bull, the dog has shown permanent courage. He defends his master, saves from drowning, warns of danger, serves faithfully in poverty and distress, leads the blind. When spoken to, does his best to hold conversation by tail, eyes, ears; drives cattle to and from pasture, keeps herds and flocks within bounds, points out game, brings shot birds, turns a spit, draws provision carts and sledges, likes or abhors music, detecting false notes instantly; announces strangers, sounds a note of warning in danger, is the last to forsake the grave of a friend, sympathizes and rejoices with every mood of his master. The collie is the only dog who has a reputation for piety, his liking to go to kirk and his proper behaviour there being well known. Whenever Stanislaus, the unfortunate King of Poland, wrote to his daughter, he always concluded with “Tristram, my companion in misfortune, licks your feet.” That one friend stuck by in his adversity. We see inherited tendencies in dogs as in children—what Paley calls “a propensity previous to experience and independent of instruction”—as Saint Bernard puppies scratching eagerly at snow, and young pointers standing steadily on first seeing poultry; a well-bred terrier pup will show ferocity. The anecdotes of achievements of pet dogs are marvellous. Leibnitz related to the French Academy an account of a dog he had seen which was taught to speak, and would call intelligibly for tea, coffee, chocolate, and made collections of white, shining stones.

We read of dogs who know when Sunday comes; who watch for the butcher’s cart only at his stated time for appearance; who will beg for a penny to buy a pie or bun, and then go to the baker’s and purchase; who exercise forethought and providence, burying bones for future need. Some seem to have some moral sense, ashamed of stealing, sometimes making retribution, scolding puppies for stealing meat; others are as depraved as human beings, slipping their collars and undoing the collar of another dog to go marauding, then returning, put their heads back into the collar.[1]

1. Darwin said, “Since publishing The Descent of Man I have got to believe rather more than I did in dogs having what may be called a conscience.”

Landseer’s dogs used to pose for him with more patience than many other sitters. Some one said of him that he had “discovered the dog.” He was so devoted to them that when the wittiest of divines and divinest of wits (of course I mean Sydney Smith) was asked to sit to him, he replied, “‘Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?’” The artist spoke of a Newfoundland who had saved many from drowning as “a distinguished member of the Humane Society.” Hamerton, in his charming Chapters on Animals, tells us stories, almost too wonderful for belief, of some French poodles who came to visit him. These canine guests played dominoes, sulked when they had to draw from the bank, retired mortified when beaten; also played cards, were skilful spellers in several languages, and quick in arithmetic.

Each breed has its own defenders and adherents. Olive Thorne Miller usually writes of birds or odd pets; but in Home Pets we find a most interesting tale of a collie, which she gives, to illustrate the characteristics of that family:

“Nearly one hundred and fifty years ago, in the early days of our nation and during the French and Indian War, this collie was a great pet in the family of a colonial soldier, and was particularly noted for his antipathy to Indians, whom he delighted to track. On one campaign against the French the dog insisted on accompanying his master, although his feet were in a terrible condition, having been frozen. During the fight, which ended in the famous Braddock’s defeat, the collie was beside his master, but when it was over they had become separated, and the soldier, concluding that his pet had been killed, went home without him. Some weeks after, however, the dog appeared in his old home, separated from the battlefield by many miles and thick forests. He was tired and worn, but over his feet were fastened neat moccasins, showing that he had been among Indians, who had been kind to him. Moreover, he soon showed that he had changed his mind about his former foe, for neither bribes nor threats could ever induce him to track an Indian. His generous nature could not forget a kindness, even to please those he loved enough to seek under so great difficulties.”

This reminds me of several dog stories.

The following interesting letter is published in the London Spectator:

“Being accustomed to walk out before breakfast with two Skye terriers, it was my custom to wash their feet in a tub, kept for the purpose in the garden, whenever the weather was wet. One morning, when I took up the dog to carry him to the tub he bit me so severely that I was obliged to let him go. No sooner was the dog at liberty than he ran down to the kitchen and hid himself. For three days he refused food, declined to go out with any of the family, and appeared very dejected, with a distressed and unusual expression of countenance.

“On the third morning, however, upon returning with the other dog, I found him sitting by the tub, and upon coming toward him he immediately jumped into it and sat down in the water. After pretending to wash his legs, he jumped out as happy as possible, and from that moment recovered his usual spirits.

“There appears in this instance to have been a clear process of reasoning, accompanied by acute feeling, going on in the dog’s mind from the moment he bit me until he hit upon a plan of showing his regret and making reparation for his fault. It evidently occurred to him that I attached great importance to this footbath, and if he could convince me that his contrition was sincere, and that he was willing to submit to the process without a murmur, I should be satisfied. The dog, in this case, reasoned with perfect accuracy, and from his own premises deduced a legitimate conclusion which the result justified.”

I like to read of the dog who waited on the town clerk of Amesbury for his license. “The possessor of the dog in question is red-headed George Morrill, and red-headed George Morrills never (hardly ever) lie, and from him we learn the following facts: It appears that Mr. Morrill, who was busy at the time, and desired to have his pet properly licensed, wrote on a slip of paper as follows: ‘Mr. Collins, please give me my license. Charlie.’ Inclosing this, with two dollars, in an envelope, he gave it to the dog, telling him to go to Mr. Collins and get his license. On arriving at the town clerk’s office he found Mr. Collins busy, and being a well-bred dog waited until the gentleman was at liberty, when he made his presence known. Mr. Collins, observing the envelope in his mouth, took it, and immediately the dog assumed a sitting posture, remaining thus until the officer made out the proper license, and, inclosing this in an envelope, handed it to his dogship, who instantly raised himself to his full length, making a bow with his head, and, coming down to his natural position, wagged his tail satisfactorily and departed for home. The dog is well known on the street for his sagacity and intelligence, but this has rather capped any of his previous performances.”

One of the best stories about the intelligence of dogs which has been told for some time was repeated a few days ago by an officer of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. He said that one of the men in the passenger department had a dog that could tell the time of day. The owner of the dog had a fine clock in his office, and he got into the habit of making the dog tap with his paw at each stroke of the clock. After a while the dog did so without being told, and as the clock gave a little cluck just before striking, the dog would get into position, prick up his ears, and tap out the time. If the clock had struck one and a little while afterward his owner imitated the preliminary cluck of the clock, the dog would give two taps with his paw, and so on for any hour. He knew just how the hours ran and how many taps to give for each one.

We must of course believe a clergyman’s story of a dog, the Rev. C. J. Adams, in The Dog Fancier:

“Not ‘Tige,’ concerning whom I have told a number of stories in this department. Tiger is another dog, and a fine fellow he is. His hair is short, and he is as black as night. I have met him but once, and that was at a clericus at the house of his master—the Rev. Peter Claude Creveling, at Cornwall, N. Y. He is probably four feet and a half long as to his body. He stands nearly as high as an ordinary table. He has a fine head—wonderfully large brain chambers. His eyes are extremely intelligent and expressive. His master loves him with a great, boisterous love characteristic of the man—who will be a great, attractive, lovable boy when he is eighty. I greet him, and hope that he may abide in the flesh till he is one hundred and eighty. But I took up my pen to write about the dog—not the master. The dog and the master are well mated. Tiger is the dog for the master, and Mr. Creveling is the master for the dog. We hardly ever meet but before we are through shaking hands Mr. Creveling begins telling me something about Tiger. This occurred, as usual, at a hotel where I was entertaining the clergy a month or so ago. The story was wonderful, and is vouched for by reliable witnesses.

“Tiger occupies the same room with Mr. and Mrs. Creveling at night. A sheet is spread for him on the floor beside the bed. They think as much of him as they would of a child. When he is restless during the night, Mr. Creveling will put his hand out and pat his head, speaking to him soothingly. During the day the sheet on which Tiger sleeps ‘o’ nights’ is kept under a washstand. This much, that what follows may be understood. Now, on a certain Sunday Mr. and Mrs. Creveling, the young lady, and all other members of the household were away—excepting Tiger. He was left locked in the house. When they returned, and Mrs. Creveling went to her room, she found that Tiger had spent a good portion of the time of his incarceration in that room and on the bed. The bed was in a very tumbled and not very clean condition—the condition in which the occupancy of such a dog would naturally leave it—a condition which any careful housewife can easily imagine—and which she can not imagine without a shudder. Mrs. Creveling cried out. Mr. Creveling came running. After him came Tiger. Mr. Creveling said: ‘Tiger, Tiger, see what you have done! You have ruined your missie’s bed. Tiger, Tiger, I feel like crying!’ Tiger’s head and tail both dropped. Without saying another word, Mr. Creveling went down stairs and into his study, threw himself on a large sofa, and covered his face and pretended to cry. Tiger, who had followed him, threw himself down on a rug beside the sofa and cried too. Mr. Creveling had faith in the dog’s intelligence. He believed that he had learned a lesson.

“Within a few days the family were all away again. Again Tiger was left in the house alone. When the family returned, Mrs. Creveling again went to her room. Tiger had been there again in her absence. He had again been on the bed. But Tiger’s sheet—the one upon which he slept at night was there too. And the sheet was spread out, covering the bed. And there had been no one to spread out the sheet for Tiger. He had spread it out for himself. Is not here a display of intelligence—of intelligence in activity in employment—of reason? What had Tiger done? He had put his nose under the washstand and pulled the sheet out. He had put the sheet on the bed. He had spread the sheet out over the bed. What had been Tiger’s train of thought? This, or something very much like it: ‘I want to lie on that bed because it reminds me of my absent master and mistress. But I don’t dare to do so. I will give offence if I do so. I will be punished. Why am I not wanted to lie on the bed? Because I soil it. What shall I do? There is the sheet—my sheet. They don’t care if I lie on that. I will spread the sheet over the bed. What a great head I have!’ The reader understands, of course, that I am not claiming that Tiger has sufficient command of the English language to even subjectively express himself as I have represented him. I have only tried to bring as strongly as possible to the reader’s mind the fact that a train of thought must have passed through the dog’s mind. And a train of thought could not pass through his mind if he hadn’t a mind. Having a mind, then what? He thinks. He reasons. What else? If my mind is immortal why not Tiger’s? And remember that I can prove the truth of every detail of this story by three witnesses—Mr. Creveling, his wife, and his wife’s friend. No court would ask more.”

Jules Janin’s dog made him a literary man. His favourite walk was in Luxembourg Garden, where he was delighted to see his dog gambol. The dog made another dog’s acquaintance, and they became so attached to each other that their masters were brought together and became friends. The new friend urged him to better his fortunes by writing for the newspapers, and introduced him to La Lorgnette, from which time he constantly rose. In 1828 he was appointed dramatic critic of the Journal des États, and his popularity there lasted undiminished for twenty years.

London has a home for lost and starving dogs, for the benefit of which a concert was recently given. Had Richard Wagner been alive, he would have doubtless bought a box for this occasion. One of the greatest sorrows of his life was the temporary loss of his Newfoundland dog in London.

Here is a quaint story which shows the gentle Elia in a most characteristic way: “Just before the Lambs quitted the metropolis,” says Pitman, “they came to spend a day with me at Fulham and brought with them a companion, who, dumb animal though he was, had for some time past been in the habit of giving play to one of Charles Lamb’s most amiable characteristics—that of sacrificing his own feelings and inclinations to those of others. This was a large and very handsome dog, of a rather curious and sagacious breed, which had belonged to Thomas Hood, and at the time I speak of, and to oblige both dog and master, had been transferred to the Lambs, who made a great pet of him, to the entire disturbance and discomfiture, as it appeared, of all Lamb’s habits of life, but especially of that most favourite and salutary of all—his long and heretofore solitary suburban walks; for Dash—that was the dog’s name—would never allow Lamb to quit the house without him, and when out, would never go anywhere but precisely where it pleased himself. The consequence was, that Lamb made himself a perfect slave to this dog, who was always half a mile off from his companion, either before or behind, scouring the fields or roads in all directions, up and down ‘all manner of streets,’ and keeping his attendant in a perfect fever of anxiety and irritation from his fear of losing him on the one hand, and his reluctance to put the needful restraint upon him on the other. Dash perfectly well knew his host’s amiable weakness in this respect, and took a doglike advantage of it. In the Regent’s Park, in particular, Dash had his quasi-master completely at his mercy, for the moment they got within the ring he used to squeeze himself through the railing and disappear for half an hour together in the then inclosed and thickly planted greensward, knowing perfectly well that Lamb did not dare to move from the spot where he (Dash) had disappeared, till he thought proper to show himself again. And they used to take this walk oftener than any other, precisely because Dash liked it, and Lamb did not.”

Beecher said that “in evolution, the dog got up before the door was shut.” If there were not reason, mirthfulness, love, honour, and fidelity in a dog, he did not know where to look for them, And Huxley has devoted much attention to the study of canine ability. He once illustrated, by the skeleton of the animal being raised on hind legs, that in internal construction the only difference between man and dog was one of size and proportion. There was not a bone in one which did not exist in the other, not a single constituent in the one that was not to be found in the other, and by the same process he could prove that the dog had a mind. His own dog was certainly not a mere piece of animate machinery. He once possessed a dog which he frequently left among the thousands frequenting Regent’s Park to secrete himself behind a tree. So soon as the animal found that he had lost his master, he laid his nose to the ground and soon tracked him to his hiding place. He believed there was no fundamental faculty connected with the reasoning powers that might not be demonstrated to exist in dogs. He did not believe that dogs ever took any pleasure in music; but this seems not to be always the case. Adelaide Phillips, the famous contralto, told me that her splendid Newfoundland Cæsar was quite a musician. She gave him singing lessons regularly. “I see him now,” she said, “his fore paws resting on my knee. I would say: ‘Now the lesson begins. Look at me, sir. Do as I do.’ Then I would run down the scale in thirds, and Cæsar, with head thrown back and swaying from side to side, would really sing the scale. He would sing the air of The Brook very correctly. But it was the best sport to see him attempt the operatic.” Here her gestures became showy and impressive, as if on the stage, and her mimicking of the dog’s efforts to follow her were comical in the extreme. Sometimes (so quickly did he catch all the tricks of the profession) he would not sing until urged again and again. Sometimes he would be “out of voice,” and make most discordant sounds. He has an honoured grave at her country home in Marshfield, where Webster also put up a stone in memory of his horse Greatheart.

Charlotte Cushman loved animals, especially dogs and horses; and her blue Skye terrier Bushie, with her human eyes and uncommon intelligence, has a permanent place in the memoirs of her mistress. Miss Cushman would say, “Play the piano, Bushie,” and Bush knew perfectly well what was meant, and would go through the performance, adding a few recitative barks with great gravity and éclat. The phrase “human eyes” recalls what Blackmore, the novelist—who has a genuine, loving appreciation of our dear dumb animals—says of a dog in Christowell: “No lady in the land has eyes more lucid, loving, eloquent, and even if she had, they would be as nothing without the tan spots over them.”

Patti has many pets, and always takes some dog with her on her travels, causing great commotion at hotels. She also leaves many behind her as a necessity. She has an aviary at her castle in Wales, and owns several most loquacious parrots.

Miss Mitford’s gushing eulogy upon one of her numerous dogs is too extravagant to be quoted at length: “There never was such a dog. His temper was, beyond comparison, the sweetest ever known. Nobody ever saw him out of humour, and his sagacity was equal to his temper.... I shall miss him every moment of my life. We covered his dead body with flowers; every flower in the garden. Everybody loved him, dear saint, as I used to call him, and as I do not doubt he now is. Heaven bless him, beloved angel!”

Mr. Fields writes: “Miss Mitford used to write me long letters about Fanchon, a dog whose personal acquaintance I had made some time before while on a visit to her cottage. Every virtue under heaven she attributed to that canine individual, and I was obliged to allow in my return letters that since our planet began to spin nothing comparable to Fanchon had ever run on four legs.”

Mrs. Browning was fond of pets, especially of her dog Flush, presented by Miss Mitford, which she has immortalized in a sonnet and a long and exquisite poem:

Flush or Faunus.

You see this dog. It was but yesterday

I mused forgetful of his presence here;

Till thought on thought drew downward tear on tear;

When from the pillow, where wet-cheeked I lay,

A head as hairy as Faunus’ thrust its way

Right sudden against my face, two golden, clear,

Great eyes astonished mine; a drooping ear
Did flap me on either cheek to dry the spray.
I started first; as some Arcadian
Amazed by goatly god in twilight grove;
But as the bearded vision closelier ran
My tears off, I knew Flush, and rose above
Surprise and sadness; thanking the true Pan

Who by low creatures leads to heights of love.

The poem is equally beautiful:

To Flush, my Dog.

Other dogs may be thy peers
Haply in these drooping ears
And this glossy fairness.

But of thee it shall be said,
This dog watched beside a bed
Day and night unweary;
Watched within a curtained room,
Where no sunbeam brake the gloom
Round the sick and weary.

Roses gathered for a vase
In that chamber died apace,
Beam and breeze resigning;
This dog only waited on,
Knowing that when light is gone
Love remains for shining.

Other dogs in thymy dew
Tracked the hares and followed through
Sunny moor or meadow;
This dog only crept and crept
Next a languid cheek that slept,
Sharing in the shadow.

Other dogs of loyal cheer
Bounded at the whistle clear,
Up the woodside hieing;
This dog only watched in reach
Of a faintly uttered speech,
Or a louder sighing.

And if one or two quick tears
Dropped upon his glossy ears,
Or a sigh came double,
Up he sprang in eager haste,
Fawning, fondling, breathing fast
In a tender trouble.

And this dog was satisfied
If a pale, thin hand would glide
Down his dewlaps sloping,
Which he pushed his nose within,
After platforming his chin
On the palm left open.

This dog, if a friendly voice
Call him now to blither choice
Than such chamber keeping,
“Come out,” praying from the door,
Presseth backward as before,
Up against me leaping.

Therefore to this dog will I,
Tenderly, not scornfully,
Render praise and favour;
With my hand upon his head,
Is my benediction said,
Therefore and forever.

Mrs. Browning said in a note to this poem: “This dog was the gift of my dear and admired friend, Miss Mitford, and belongs to the beautiful race she has rendered celebrated among English and American readers.”

Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, addressed a long poem to his dog, ending:

When my last bannock’s on the hearth,
Of that thou canna want thy share;
While I ha’e house or hauld on earth,
My Hector shall ha’e shelter there.

Another favourite was honoured by Dr. Holland, the essayist, lecturer, magazine editor, and poet:

To my Dog Blanco.

My dear, dumb friend, low lying there,
A willing vassal at my feet,
Glad partner of my home and fare,
My shadow in the street.

I look into your great brown eyes,
Where love and loyal homage shine,
And wonder where the difference lies
Between your soul and mine!

For all of good that I have found
Within myself or human kind,
Hath royally informed and crowned
Your gentle heart and mind.

I scan the whole broad earth around
For that one heart which, leal and true,
Bears friendship without end or bound,
And find the prize in you.

I trust you as I trust the stars;
Nor cruel loss, nor scoff of pride,
Nor beggary, nor dungeon bars,
Can move you from my side!

As patient under injury
As any Christian saint of old,
As gentle as a lamb with me,
But with your brothers bold;

More playful than a frolic boy,
More watchful than a sentinel,
By day and night your constant joy
To guard and please me well.

I clasp your head upon my breast—
The while you whine and lick my hand—
And thus our friendship is confessed,
And thus we understand!

Ah, Blanco! did I worship God
As truly as you worship me,
Or follow where my Master trod
With your humility—

Did I sit fondly at his feet,
As you, dear Blanco, sit at mine,
And watch him with a love as sweet,
My life would grow divine!

Maria Edgeworth wrote to her aunt, Mrs. Ruxton, in 1819, “I see my little dog on your lap, and feel your hand patting his head, and hear your voice telling him that it is for Maria’s sake he is there.”

What a pathetic friendship existed between Emily Brontë and the dog whom she was sure could understand every word she said to him! “She always fed the animals herself; the old cat; Flossy, her favourite spaniel; Keeper, the fierce bulldog, her own constant dear companion, whose portrait, drawn by her own spirited hand, is still extant. And the creatures on the moor were all in a sense her pets and familiar with her. The intense devotion of this silent woman to all manner of dumb creatures has something almost inexplicable. As her old father and her sisters followed her to the grave they were joined by another mourner, Keeper, Emily’s dog. He walked in front of all, first in the rank of mourners, and perhaps no other creature had loved the dead woman quite so well. When they had laid her to sleep in the dark, airless vault under the church, and when they had crossed the bleak churchyard and had entered the empty house again, Keeper went straight to the door of the room where his mistress used to sleep, and laid down across the threshold. There he howled piteously for many days, knowing not that no lamentations could wake her any more.”

Dogs were supposed by the ancient Gaels to know of the death of a friend, however far they might be separated. But this is getting too gloomy. Do you know how the proverb originated “as cold as a dog’s nose”? An old verse tells us:

There sprang a leak in Noah’s ark,
Which made the dog begin to bark;
Noah took his nose to stop the hole,
And hence his nose is always cold.

No one has expressed more appreciation of the noble qualities of dogs than the abstracted, philosophic Wordsworth.

Incident

Characteristic of a Favourite Dog.

On his morning rounds the master
Goes to learn how all things fare;
Searches pasture after pasture,
Sheep and cattle eyes with care;
And, for silence or for talk,
He hath comrades in his walk;
Four dogs, each pair of different breed,

Distinguished two for scent and two for speed.

See a hare before him started!
Off they fly in earnest chase;
Every dog is eager-hearted,
All the four are in the race:
And the hare whom they pursue,
Hath an instinct what to do;
Her hope is near: no turn she makes;
But, like an arrow, to the river takes.

Deep the river was, and crusted
Thinly by a one night’s frost;
But the nimble hare hath trusted
To the ice, and safely crost;
She hath crossed, and without heed
All are following at full speed,
When, lo! the ice, so thinly spread,
Breaks—and the greyhound, Dart, is over head!

Better fate have Prince and Swallow—

See them cleaving to the sport!

Music has no heart to follow,

Little Music, she stops short.

She hath neither wish nor heart,

Hers is now another part:

A loving creature she, and brave!

And fondly strives her struggling friend to save.

From the brink her paws she stretches,
Very hands as you would say!
And afflicting moans she fetches,
As he breaks the ice away.
For herself she hath no fears,
Him alone she sees and hears,

Makes efforts and complainings; nor gives o’er

Until her fellow sank, and reappeared no more.

Tribute

To the Memory of the Same Dog.

Lie here, without a record of thy worth,
Beneath a covering of the common earth!
It is not from unwillingness to praise,
Or want of love, that here no stone we raise;

More thou deservest; but this man gives to man,

Brother to brother, this is all we can.

Yet they to whom thy virtues made thee dear

Shall find thee through all changes of the year:

This oak points out thy grave; the silent tree

Will gladly stand a monument of thee.

Cowper, who tenderly loved all animals, did not fail to honour a dog with a poetical tribute in The Dog and the Water Lily, celebrating the devotion of “my spaniel, prettiest of his race.”

It was the time when Ouse displayed
His lilies newly blown;
Their beauties I intent surveyed,
And one I wished my own.

With cane extended far, I sought
To steer it close to land;
But still the prize, though nearly caught,
Escaped my eager hand.

Beau marked my unsuccessful pains
With fixed, considerate face,
And puzzling set his puppy brains
To comprehend, the case.

But chief myself, I will enjoin,
Awake at duty’s call,
To show a love as prompt as thine
To Him who gives us all.

But with a chirrup clear and strong,
Dispersing all his dream,
I thence withdrew, and followed long
The windings of the stream.

My ramble finished, I returned.

Beau, trotting far before,

The floating wreath again discerned,

And, plunging, left the shore.

I saw him, with that lily cropped,
Impatient swim to meet
My quick approach, and soon he dropped
The treasure at my feet.

Charmed with this sight, the world, I cried,

Shall hear of this, thy deed:

My dog shall mortify the pride

Of man’s superior breed.

Forster tells us fully of Dickens’s devotion to his many dogs, quoting the novelist’s inimitable way of describing his favourites. In Dr. Marigold there is an especially good bit about “me and my dog.”

“My dog knew as well as I did when she was on the turn. Before she broke out he would give a howl and bolt. How he knew it was a mystery to me, but the sure and certain knowledge of it would wake him up out of his soundest sleep, and would give a howl and bolt. At such times I wished I was him.” After the death of child and wife, he says: “Me and my dog was all the company left in the cart now, and the dog learned to give a short bark when they wouldn’t bid, and to give another and a nod of his head when I asked him ‘Who said half a crown?’ He attained to an immense height of popularity, and, I shall always believe, taught himself entirely out of his own head to growl at any person in the crowd that bid as low as sixpence. But he got to be well on in years, and one night when I was convulsing York with the spectacles he took a convulsion on his own account, upon the very footboard by me, and it finished him.”

Mr. Laurence Hutton, in the St. Nicholas, has lately expressed his sentiments about dogs, as follows:

“It was Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh, I think, who spoke in sincere sympathy of the man who “led a dog-less life.” It was Mr. “Josh Billings,” I know, who said that in the whole history of the world there is but one thing that money can not buy—to wit, the wag of a dog’s tail. And it was Prof. John C. Van Dyke who declared the other day, in reviewing the artistic career of Landseer, that he made his dogs too human. It was the great Creator himself who made dogs too human—so human that sometimes they put humanity to shame.

“I have been the friend and confidant of three dogs, who helped to humanize me for the space of a quarter of a century, and who had souls to be saved, I am sure, and when I cross the Stygian River I expect to find on the other shore a trio of dogs wagging their tails almost off in their joy at my coming, and with honest tongues hanging out to lick my hands and my feet. And then I am going, with these faithful, devoted dogs at my heels, to talk dogs over with Dr. John Brown, Sir Edward Landseer, and Mr. Josh Billings.”

Do dogs have souls—a spark of life that after death lives on elsewhere?

Many have hoped so, from Wesley to the little boy who has lost his cherished comrade.

It is certain that dogs show qualities that in a man would be called reason, quick apprehension, presence of mind, courage, self-abnegation, affection unto death.

At the close of this chapter may I be allowed to tell of two of my special friends—one a fox terrier, owned by Mr. Howard Ticknor, of Boston; the other my own interesting pet—who have never failed to learn any trick suggested to them? Antoninus Pius, called Tony for short, goes through more than a score of wonderful accomplishments, such as playing on the piano, crossing his paws and looking extremely artistic, if not inspired, dancing a skirt dance, spinning on a flax wheel, performing on a tambourine swung by a ribbon round his neck; plays pattycake with his mistress. And my own intelligent Yorkshire terrier mounts a chair back and preaches with animation, eloquence, and forcible gestures; knocks down a row of books and then sits on them, as a book reviewer; stands in a corner with right paw uplifted, as a tableau of Liberty enlightening the World; rings a bell repeatedly and with increasing energy, to call us to the table; sings with head and eyes uplifted, to accompaniment of harmonica—and each is just beginning his education.

I have read lately an account of a knowing dog, with a sort of sharp cockney ability, who used to go daily with penny in mouth and buy a roll. Once one right out of the oven was given to him; he dropped it, seized his money off the counter, and changed his baker.

COMPLIMENTS TO CATS.

You may own a cat, but cannot govern one.

TO A KITTEN.

But not alone by cottage fire
Do rustics rude thy feats admire;
The learnèd sage, whose thoughts explore
The widest range of human lore;
Or, with unfettered fancy fly
Through airy heights of poesy;
Pausing, smiles with altered air
To see thee climb his elbow-chair,
Or, struggling with the mat below,
Hold warfare with his slippered toe.
Joanna Baillie.

CATS.

God made the cat in order to give to man the pleasurable sense of having caressed the tiger.

Méry.

Public sentiment is not so unanimously in favour of cats, yet they have had their warm admirers, while in Egypt they were adored as divine—worshipped as an emblem of the moon. When a cat died, the owners gave the body a showy funeral, went into mourning, and shaved off their eyebrows. Diodorus tells of a Roman soldier who was condemned to death for killing a cat. It is said that Cambyses, King of Persia, when he went to fight the Egyptians, fastened before every soldier’s breast a live cat. Their enemies dared not run the risk of hurting their sacred pets, and so were conquered.

Artists, monarchs, poets, diplomatists, religious leaders, authors, have all condescended to care for cats. A mere list of their names would make a big book. For instance, Godefroi Mind, a German artist, was called the Raphael of Cats. People would hunt him up in his attic, and pay large prices for his pictures. In the long winter evenings he amused himself carving tiny cats out of chestnuts, and could not make them fast enough for those who wanted to buy. Mohammed was so fond of his cat Muezza that once, when she was sleeping on his sleeve, he cut off the sleeve rather than disturb her. Andrew Doria, one of the rulers of Venice, not only had a portrait painted of his pet cat, but after her death had her skeleton preserved as a treasure. Richelieu’s special favourite was a splendid Angora, his resting place being the table covered with state papers. Montaigne used to rest himself by a frolic with his cat. Fontenelle liked to place his “Tom” in an armchair and deliver an oration before him. The cat of Cardinal Wolsey sat by his side when he received princes. Petrarch had his pet feline embalmed and placed in his apartment.

You see, the idea of the cat being the pet of old maids alone is far from true. Edward Lear, of Nonsense Verses fame, wrote of himself:

He has many friends, laymen and clerical;
Old Foss is the name of his cat;
His body is perfectly spherical;
He weareth a runcible hat.

Wordsworth wrote about a Kitten and the Falling Leaves. A volume of two hundred and eighty-five pages of poems in all languages, consecrated to the memory of a single cat, was published at Milan in 1741. Shelley wrote verses to a cat.

It seems unjust to assert that the cat is incapable of personal attachment, when she has won the affection of so many of earth’s great ones. The skull of Morosini’s cat is preserved among the relics of that Venetian worthy. Andrea Doria’s cat was painted with him. Sir Henry Wyat’s gratitude to the cat who saved him from starvation in the Tower of London by bringing him pigeons to eat, caused this remark: “You shall not find his picture anywhere but with a cat beside him.” Cowper often wrote about his cats and kittens. Horace Walpole wrote to Gray, mourning the loss of his handsomest cat, and Gray replied: “I know Zara and Zerlina, or rather I knew them both together, for I can not justly say which was which. Then, as to your handsomest cat, I am no less at a loss; as well as knowing one’s handsomest cat is always the cat one likes best, or, if one be alive and the other dead, it is usually the latter that is handsomest. Besides, if the point were so clear, I hope you do not think me so ill bred as to forget my interest in the survivor—oh, no! I would rather seem to mistake, and imagine, to be sure, that it must be the tabby one.” It was the tabby; her death being sudden and pitiful, tumbling from a “lofty vase’s side” while trying to secure a goldfish for her dinner. Gray sent Walpole an ode inspired by the misfortune, in which he said:

What woman’s heart can gold despise?

What cat’s averse to fish?

and thus describes the final scene:

Eight times emerging from the flood,

She mewed to every watery god

Some speedy aid to send.

No dolphin came, no Nereid stirred,

Nor cruel Tom nor Susan heard.

A favourite has no friend.

Upon Gray’s death, Walpole placed Zerlina’s vase upon a pedestal marked with the first stanza.

Jeremy Bentham at first christened his cat Langbourne; afterward, Sir John Langbourne; and when very wise and dignified, the Rev. Sir John Langbourne, D. D. Pius IX allowed his cat to sit with him at table, waiting his turn to be fed in a most decorous manner. Théophile Gautier tells us how beautifully his cats behaved at the dinner table. A friend visiting Bishop Thirlwall in his retirement, thought he looked weary, and asked him to take the big easy-chair. “Don’t you see who is already there?” said the great churchman, pointing to a cat asleep on the cushion. “She must not be disturbed.” Helen Hunt Jackson devoted a large book to the praise of cats and kittens. We know that Isaac Newton was fond of cats, for did he not make two holes in his barn door—a big one for old pussy to go in and out, and a little one for the kitty?

Among French authors we recall Rousseau, who has much to say in favour of felines. Colbert reared half a dozen cats in his study, and taught them many interesting tricks. The cat supplied Perrault with one of the most attractive subjects of his stories, and under the magical pen of this admirable story-teller, Puss in Boots has become an example of the power of work, industry, and savoir-faire. Gautier scoffs at storms raging without, as long as he has

Sur mes genoux un chat qui se joue et folâtre,

Un livre pour veiller, un fauteil pour devenir.

Béranger, in his idyl The Cat, makes an intelligent cat a go-between of lovers. Baudelaire returned from his wanderings in the East a devotee of cats, and addressed to them several fine bits of verse; they are seen in his poetry, as dogs in the paintings of Paul Veronese. Here is a sample:

Come, beauty, rest upon my loving heart,
But cease thy paws’ sharp-nailèd play,
And let me peer into those eyes that dart
Mixed agate and metallic ray.

Again:

Grave scholars and mad lovers all admire

And love, and each alike, at his full tide

Those suave and puissant cats, the fireside’s pride,

Who like the sedentary life and glow of fire.

How he enjoys, nay, revels in the musical purr!—

Those tones which purl and percolate
Deep down into my shadowy soul,
Exalt me like a fine tune’s roll,
And yield the joy love philters make.

There is no note in the world,
Nor perfect instrument I know,
Can lift my heart to such a glow
And set its vibrant chord in whirl,
As thy rich voice mysterious.

Champfleury, another French writer, has recorded that, visiting Victor Hugo once, he found, in a room decorated with tapestries and Gothic furniture, a cat enthroned on a dais, and apparently receiving the homage of the company. Sainte-Beuve’s cat sat on his desk, and walked freely over his critical essays. “I value in the cat,” says Chateaubriand, “that indifferent and almost ungrateful temper which prevents itself from attaching itself to any one; the indifference with which it passes from the salon to the housetop.” Marshal Turenne amused himself for hours in playing with his kittens. The great general, Lord Heathfield, would often appear on the walls of Gibraltar at the time of the famous siege, attended by his favourite cats. Montaigne wrote: “When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me? We mutually divert each other with our play. If I have my hour to begin or refuse, so has she.” As George Eliot puts it, “Who can tell what just criticisms the cat may be passing on us beings of wider speculation?” Chateaubriand’s cat Micette is well known. He used to stroke her tail, to notify Madame Récamier that he was tired or bored.

Cats and their friendships are not spoken of in the Bible. But they are mentioned in Sanskrit writing two thousand years old, and, as has been said before, they were household pets and almost idols with the Egyptians, who mummied them in company with kings and princes. They were also favourites in India and Persia, and can claim relationship with the royal felines of the tropics. Simonides, in his Satire on Women, the earliest extant, sets it down that froward women were made from cats, just as most virtuous, industrious matrons were developed from beer. In Mills’s History of the Crusades the cat was an important personage in religious festivals. At Aix, in Provence, the finest he cat was wrapped like a child in swaddling clothes and exhibited in a magnificent shrine: every knee bent, every hand strewed flowers.

Several cats have been immortalized by panegyrics and epitaphs from famous masters. Joachim de Bellay has left this pretty tribute:

C’est Beland, mon petit chat gris—
Beland, qui fut peraventure
Le plus bel œuvre que nature
Fit onc en matière de chats.

The pensive Selima, owned by Walpole, was mourned by Gray, and from the Elegy we get the favourite aphorism, “A favourite has no friends.” Arnold mourned the great Atossa. One of Tasso’s best sonnets was addressed to his favourite cat. Cats figure in literature from Gammer Gurton’s Needle to our own day. Shakespeare mentions the cat forty-four times—“the harmless, necessary cat,” etc. Goldsmith wrote:

Around in sympathetic mirth
Its tricks the kitten tries;
The cricket chirrups in the hearth,
The crackling fagot flies.

Joanna Baillie wrote in the same strain.

In one of Gay’s fables about animals the cat is asked what she can do to benefit the proposed confederation. She answers scornfully:

... These teeth, these claws,
With vigilance shall serve the cause.
The mouse destroyed by my pursuit
No longer shall your feasts pollute,
Nor eat, from nightly ambuscade
With watchful teeth your stores invade.

The story of Dick Whittington and his cat is doubtless true. All the pictorial and architectural relics of Whittington represent him with the cat—a black and white cat—at his left hand, or his hand resting on a cat. One of the figures that adorned the gate at Newgate represented Liberty with the figure of a cat lying at her feet. Whittington was a former founder. In the cellar of his old house at Gloucester there was found a stone, probably part of a chimney, showing in basso-rilievo the figure of a boy carrying in his arms a cat. Cowper has a poem on A Cat retired from Business. Heinrich’s verses are well known, or should be:

The neighbours’ old cat often

Came to pay us a visit.

We made her a bow and a courtesy,

Each with a compliment in it.

After her health we asked,
Our care and regard to evince;
We have made the very same speeches
To many an old cat since.

This translation was by Mrs. Browning; many others have tried it with success. Alfred de Musset apostrophized his cats in verse. Paul de Koch frequently describes a favourite cat in his novels. Hoffman, the German novelist, introduces cats into his weird and fantastic tales, and Poe has given us The Black Cat. Keats composed a

Sonnet to a Cat:

Cat, who has passed thy grand climacteric,
How many mice and rats hast in thy days
Destroyed? How many tidbits stolen? Gaze

With those bright languid segments green, and prick

Those velvet ears, but prythee do not stick

Thy latent talons in me, and tell me all thy frays,

Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick;

Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists,

For all thy wheezy asthma, and for all

Thy tail’s tip is nicked off, and though the fists

Of many a maid have given thee many a maul,

Still is thy fur as when the lists

In youth thou enteredst on glass-bottled wall.

Clinton Scollard writes tenderly of his lost

Grimalkin:

An Elegy on Peter, aged Twelve.

In vain the kindly call; in vain
The plate for which thou once wast fain
At morn and noon and daylight’s wane,
O king of mousers.
No more I hear thee purr and purr
As in the frolic days that were,
When thou didst rub thy velvet fur
Against my trousers.

How empty are the places where
Thou erst wert frankly debonair,
Nor dreamed a dream of feline care,
A capering kitten.
The sunny haunts where, grown a cat,
You pondered this, considered that,
The cushioned chair, the rug, the mat,
By firelight smitten.

Although of few thou stood’st in dread,
How well thou knew’st a friendly tread,
And what upon thy back or head
The stroking hand meant!
A passing scent could keenly wake
Thy eagerness for chop or steak.
Yet, puss, how rarely didst thou break
The eighth commandment!

Though brief thy life, a little span
Of days compared with that of man,
The time allotted to thee ran
In smoother meter.
Now with the warm earth o’er thy breast,
O wisest of thy kind and best,
Forever mayst thou softly rest,
In pace—Peter.

Agnes Repplier, in her Essays in Idleness and Dozy Hours, tells us of Agrippina and her child. Charles Dudley Warner gave to the world a character sketch of his cat Calvin.

A young girl who was in the house with Mr. Whittier, and of whom he was very fond, went to him one day with tearful eyes and a rueful face and said: “My dear little kitty Bathsheba is dead, and I want you to write a poem to put on her gravestone. I shall bury her under a rose bush!” Without a moment’s hesitation the poet said:

Bathsheba! to whom none ever said scat!
No worthier cat
Ever sat on a mat
Or caught a rat;
Requiescat!

Cats are made very useful. The English Government keeps cats in public offices, dockyards, stores, shipping, and so on. In Vienna, four cats are employed by town magistrates to catch mice on the premises of the municipality with a regular allowance, voted for their keeping, during active service, afterward placed on the retired list with comfortable pension; much better cared for than college professors or superannuated ministers in our country. There are a certain number of cats in the United States Post Office to protect mail bags from rats and mice; also, in the Imperial Printing Office in France, a feline staff with a keeper. Cats are given charge of empty corn sacks, so that they shall not be nibbled and devoured. Cats are invaluable to farmers in barns and outhouses, stables, and newly mown fields.

There are many proverbs about the cat. Shakespeare says,

Letting I dare not wait upon I would,

Like the poor cat i’ the adage,

meaning, expressed in another proverb,

The cat loves fish, but does not like

To wet her paws.

Good liquor will make a cat speak.

Not room to swing a cat.

They used to swing a cat to the branch of a tree as a mark to shoot at.

Honest as the cat when the meal is out of reach.

Let the cat out of the bag.

A cat was sometimes substituted for a sucking pig, and carried in a bag to market. If a greenhorn chose to buy without examination, very well; but if he opened the bag the trick was discovered, and he “let the cat out of the bag.”

Sick as a cat.

Touch not a cat without a glove.

What can you have of a cat but her skin?

To be made a cat’s paw of,

referring to the fable of the monkey who took the paw of a cat to get some roasted chestnuts from the hot ashes.

Who is to bell the cat?

alluding to the cunning old mouse who suggested that they should hang a bell on the cat’s neck to let all mice know of her approach. “Excellent,” said a wise young mouse, “but who will undertake the job?”

Madame Henriette Ronner has given up half of her long artistic career to the study of cats, producing a cat world as impressive as the cattle world of Potter or the stag and dog world of Landseer. Harrison Weirs is one of Pussy’s most devoted adherents. He originated cat shows at Crystal Palace, London. He says that dogs, large or small, are generally useless; while a cat, whether petted or not, is of service. Without her, rats and mice would overrun the house. If there were not millions of cats there would be billions of vermin. He believes that cats are more critical in noticing than dogs, as he has seen a cat open latched doors and push back bolt or bar; they will wait for the butcher, hoping for bits of meat, looking for him only on his stated days, and know the time for the luncheon bell to ring. Dogs often bite when angry; cats seldom. They will travel a long distance to regain home; form devoted attachments to other animals, as horses, cocks, collies, cows, hens, rabbits, squirrels, and even rats, and can be taught to respect the life of birds.

Exactly opposite opinions are held by others, equally good and fair judges, and with these the cat is considered selfish, spiteful, crafty, treacherous, and, like a low style of politician, subservient only to the power that feeds them, and provides a warm berth to snuggle down in. And we find many anecdotes, well authenticated, proving them to be docile, affectionate, good-tempered, tractable, and even possessed of something very like intellect. In the life of Sir David Brewster, by his daughter, we find that a cat in the house entered his room one day and made friendship in the most affectionate manner; “looked straight at him, jumped on my father’s knee, placed a paw on each shoulder, and kissed him as distinctly as a cat could. From that time the philosopher himself provided her breakfast every morning from his own plate, till one day she disappeared, to the unbounded sorrow of her master. Nothing was heard of her for nearly two years, when Pussy walked into the house, neither thirsty nor footsore, made her way without hesitation to the study, jumped on my father’s knee, placed a paw on each shoulder and kissed him, exactly as on the first day.”

Cats can be trained to shake hands, jump over a stick, sit up on hind legs, come at a whistle, beg like a dog, but we seldom take the trouble to find out how easily they can be taught. Madame Piozzi (Mrs. Thrale) tells us of Dr. Johnson’s kindness to his cat, named Hodge. When the creature had grown old and fastidious from illness, and could eat nothing but oysters, the gruff old lexicographer always went out himself to buy Hodge’s dinner. Boswell adds: “I recollect Hodge one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson’s breast apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend, smiling and half whistling, rubbed down his back and pulled him by the tail, and when I observed he had a fine cat, saying, ‘Why yes, sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this,’ and then, as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, ‘But he is a fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.’ He once gave a ludicrous account of the despicable state of a young gentleman of good family. ‘Sir, when I heard of him last he was running about town shooting cats.’ And then, in a sort of friendly reverie, he added, ‘But Hodge sha’n’t be shot; no, Hodge sha’n’t be shot.’” And this from the gruff, dogmatic thunderer who snubbed or silenced every antagonist. Even the selfish, courtly Lord Chesterfield left a permanent pension for his cats and their descendants. Robert Southey has written a Memoir of the Cats of Greta Hall. He liked to see his cats look plump and healthy, and tried to make them comfortable and happy. When they were ill he had them carefully nursed by the “ladies of the kitchen,” and doctored by the Keswick apothecary. Indeed, cats and kittens were so petted and fondled at Greta Hall by old and young that Southey sometimes called the place “Cats’ Eden.” In a letter to one of his cat-loving friends he says that “a house is never perfectly furnished for enjoyment unless there is a child in it rising three years old, and a kitten rising three weeks.” This memorial gives such truthful and impartial biographies of his rat-catching friends that he deserves to be known and admired as the Plutarch of Cats. The history was compiled for his daughter. He begins in this way: “Forasmuch, most excellent Edith May, as you must always feel a natural and becoming concern in whatever relates to the house wherein you were born, and in which the first part of your life has thus far so happily been spent, I have for your instruction and delight composed these memoirs, to the end that the memory of such worthy animals may not perish, but be held in deserved honour by my children and those who shall come after them.” The sketch is too long to be given, but it is sparkling with fun and at times tragic with sad adventures. Their names were as remarkable as their characters: Madame Bianchi; Pulcheria Ovid, so called because he might be presumed to be a master in the art of love; Virgil, because something like Ma-ro might be detected in his notes of courtship; Othello, black and jealous; Prester John, who turned out not to be of John’s gender, and therefore had the name altered to Pope Joan; Rumpelstilchen, a name borrowed from Grimm’s Tales, and Hurlyburlybuss. Rumpelstilchen lived nine years. After describing various cats, their adventures and misadventures, Madame Bianchi disappeared, and Pulcheria soon after died of a disease epidemic at that time among cats. “For a considerable time afterward an evil fortune attended all our attempts at re-establishing a cattery. Ovid disappeared and Virgil died of some miserable distemper. The Pope, I am afraid, came to a death of which other popes have died. I suspect that some poison which the rats had turned out of their holes proved fatal to their enemy. For some time I feared we were at the end of our cat-a-logue, but at last Fortune, as if to make amends for her late severity, sent us two at once, the never-to-be-enough-praised Rumpelstilchen, and the equally-to-be-admired Hurlyburlybuss. And ‘first for the first of these,’ as my huge favourite and almost namesake Robert South says in his sermons.” He then explains at length a German tale in Grimm’s collection (a most charming tale it is, too), which gave the former cat his strange and magi-sonant appellation. “Whence came Hurlyburlybuss was long a mystery. He appeared here as Manco Capac did in Peru and Quetzalcohuatl among the Aztecs—no one knew whence. He made himself acquainted with all the philofelists of the family, attaching himself more particularly to Mrs. Lorell; but he never attempted to enter the house, frequently disappeared for days, and once since my return for so long a time that he was actually believed to be dead and veritably lamented as such. The wonder was, whither did he retire at such times, and to whom did he belong; for neither I in my daily walks, nor the children, nor any of the servants, ever by chance saw him anywhere except in our own domain. There was something so mysterious in this that in old times it might have excited strong suspicion, and he would have been in danger of passing for a witch in disguise, or a familiar. The mystery, however, was solved about four weeks ago, when, as we were returning home from a walk up the Greta, Isabel saw him on his transit across the road and the wall from Shulicson in a direction toward the hill. But to this day we are ignorant who has the honour to be his owner in the eye of the law, and the owner is equally ignorant of the high favour in which Hurlyburlybuss is held, of the heroic name he has obtained, and that his fame has extended far and wide; yea, that with Rumpelstilchen he has been celebrated in song, and that his glory will go down to future generations. A strong enmity existed between these two cats of remarkable nomenclature, and many were their altercations. Some weeks ago Hurlyburlybuss was manifestly emaciated and enfeebled by ill health, and Rumpelstilchen with great magnanimity made overtures of peace. The whole progress of the treaty was seen from the parlour window. The caution with which Rumpel made his advances, the sullen dignity with which they were received, their mutual uneasiness when Rumpel, after a slow and wary approach seated himself whisker to whisker with his rival, the mutual fear which restrained not only teeth and claws but even all tones of defiance, the mutual agitation of their tails, which, though they did not expand with anger could not be kept still for suspense, and lastly the manner in which Hurly retreated, like Ajax, still keeping his face toward his old antagonist, were worthy to have been represented by that painter who was called the Raphael of Cats. The overture, I fear, was not accepted as generously as it was made, for no sooner had Hurlyburlybuss recovered strength than hostilities were recommenced with greater violence than before. Dreadful were the combats which ensued.... All means of reconciling them and making them understand how goodly a thing it is for cats to dwell together in peace, and what fools they are to quarrel and tear each other, are vain. The proceedings of the Society for the Abolition of War are not more utterly ineffectual and hopeless. All we can do is to act more impartially than the gods did between Achilles and Hector, and continue to treat both with equal regard.” I will only add the closing words: “And thus having brought down these Memoirs of the Cats of Greta Hall to the present day, I commit the precious memorial to your keeping. Most dissipated and light-heeled daughter, your most diligent and light-hearted father, Keswick, 18 June, 1824.” Rumpel lived nine years, surrounded by loving attentions, and when he died, May 18, 1833, Southey wrote to an old friend, Grosvenor Bedford: “Alas! Grosvenor, this day poor old Rumpel was found dead, after as long and happy a life as cat could wish for, if cats form wishes on that subject. There should be a court mourning in cat land, and if the Dragon (a cat of Mr. Bedford’s) wear a black ribbon around his neck, or a band of crepe, à la militaire, round one of the forepaws, it will be but a becoming mark of respect. As we have no catacombs here, he is to be decently interred in the orchard, and catnip planted on his grave.”

Among modern celebrities who are fond of cats are the actress, Ellen Terry, who loves to play with kittens on the floor; Mr. Edmund Yates, the late novelist and journalist, whose cat used to sit down to dinner beside her master; and Julian Hawthorne, who has a faithful friend in his noble Tom, who invariably sits on his shoulder while he is writing. And when Tom thinks enough work has been done for one sitting, he gets down to the table and pulls away the manuscript. A cat denoted liberty, and was carved at the feet of the Roman Goddess of Liberty. Cats are seldom given credit for either intelligence or affection, but many trustworthy anecdotes prove that they possess both, and also that they seem to understand what is said, not only to them but about them. They are more unsophisticated than the dog; civilization to them has not yet become second nature.

A Cat Story.

You may be interested in hearing of the crafty trick of a black Persian. Prin is a magnificent animal, but withal a most dainty one, showing distinct disapproval of any meat not cooked in the especial way he likes, viz., roast. The cook, of whom he is very fond, determined to break this bad habit. Stewed or boiled meat was accordingly put ready for him, but, as he had often done before, he turned from it in disgust. However, this time no fish or roast was substituted. For three days the saucer of meat was untouched, and no other food given. But on the fourth morning the cook was much rejoiced at finding the saucer empty. Prin ran to meet her, and the good woman told her mistress how extra affectionate that repentant cat was that morning. He did enjoy his dinner of roast that day (no doubt served with a double amount of gravy). It was not till the pot-board under the dresser was cleaned on Saturday that his artfulness was brought to light. There, in one of the stewpans back of the others, was the contents of the saucer of stewed meat. There was no other animal about the place, and the other two servants were as much astonished as the cook at the clever trick played on them by this terribly spoiled pet of the house. But the cook was mortified at the thought of that saucer of roast beef. I know this story to be true, and I have known the cat for the last nine or ten years. It lives at Clapham.

I will close this catalogue of feline attractions with two conundrums: Why does a cat cross the road? Because it wants to get to the other side. What is that which never was and never will be? A mouse’s nest in a cat’s ear.

ALL SORTS.

God made all the creatures and gave them our love and our fear,

To give sign, we and they are his children, one family here.

Browning’s Saul.

ALL SORTS.

If thy heart be right, then will every creature be to thee a mirror of life, and a book of holy doctrine.—Thomas À Kempis.

It would be pleasant to believe it was a proof of a good and tender nature to delight in pets, but men and women, notorious for cruelty and bad lives, have been devoted to them, lavishing tenderness, elsewhere denied. Catullus, the famous Roman poet, wrote a lament for Lesbia’s Sparrow; Lesbia, the shameless, false-hearted beauty who could weep for a dead bird, but poison her husband! You often see pretty plaster heads of Lesbia with the bird perched upon her finger, her face bent toward it with a look that is a caress. And the poem has not lost its grace or charm through all the centuries.

On the Death of Lesbia’s Sparrow.

Mourn, all ye Loves and Graces! mourn,

Ye wits, ye gallants, and ye gay!

Death from my fair her bird has torn—

Her much-loved sparrows snatched away.

Her very eyes she prized not so,
For he was fond, and knew my fair
Well as young girls their mothers know,
And sought her breast and nestled there.

Once, fluttering round from place to place,
He gaily chirped to her alone;
But now that gloomy path must trace
Whence Fate permits none to return.

Accursèd shades o’er hell that lower,

Oh, be my curses on you heard!

Ye, that all pretty things devour,

Have torn from me my pretty bird.

Oh, evil deed! Oh, sparrow dead!

Oh, what a wretch, if thou canst see

My fair one’s eyes with weeping red,

And know how much she grieves for thee.

James I, of England, whom Dickens designates as “His Sowship,” to express his detestation of his character, had a variety of dumb favourites. Although a remorseless destroyer of animals in the chase, he had an intense pleasure in seeing them around him happy and well cared for in a state of domesticity. In 1623 John Bannat obtained a grant of the king’s interest in the leases of two gardens and a tenement in the Nuriones, on the condition of building and maintaining a house wherein to keep and rear his Majesty’s newly imported silkworms. Sir Thomas Dale, one of the settlers of the then newly formed colony of Virginia, returning to Europe on leave, brought with him many living specimens of American zoölogy, among them some flying squirrels. This coming to his Majesty’s ears, he was seized with a boyish impatience to add them to the private menageries in St. James’s Park. At the council table and in the circle of his courtiers he recurs again and again to the subject, wondering why Sir Thomas had not given him “the first pick” of his cargo of curiosities. He reminded them how the recently arrived Muscovite ambassador had brought him live sables, and, what he loved even better, splendid white gyrfalcons of Iceland; and when Buckingham suggested that in the whole of her reign Queen Elizabeth had never received live sables from the Czar, James made special inquiries if such were really the case. Some one of his loving subjects, desirous of ministering to his favourite hobby, had presented him with a cream-coloured fawn. A nurse was immediately hired for it, and the Earl of Shrewsbury commissioned to write as follows to Miles Whytakers, signifying the royal pleasure as to future procedure: “The king’s Majesty hath commissioned me to send this rare beast, a white hind calf, unto you, together with a woman, his nurse, that hath kept it and bred it up. His Majesty would have you see it be kept in every respect as this good woman doth desire, and that the woman be lodged and boarded by you until his Majesty come to Theobald’s on Monday next, and then you shall know further of his pleasure. What account his Majesty maketh of this fine beast you may guess, and no man can suppose it to be more rare than it is; therefore I know that your care of it will be accordingly. So in haste I bid you my hearty farewell. At Whitehall, this 6th of November, 1611.”

About 1629 the King of Spain effected an important diversion in his own favour by sending the king—priceless gift—an elephant and five camels. Going through London after midnight, says a state paper, they could not pass unseen, and the clamour and outcry raised by some street loiterers at sight of their ponderous bulk and ungainly step, roused the sleepers from their beds in every street through which they passed. News of this unlooked-for addition to the Zoölogical Garden is conveyed to Theobald’s as speedily as horseflesh, whip and spur, could do their work. Then arose an interchange of missives to and fro betwixt the king, my lord treasurer, and Mr. Secretary Connay, grave, earnest, deliberate, as though involving the settlement or refusal of some treaty of peace. In muttered sentences, not loud but deep, the thrifty lord treasurer shows “how little he is in love with royal presents, which cost his master as much to maintain as could a garrison.” No matter. Warrants are issued to the officers of the Mews and to Buckingham, master of the horse, that the elephant is to be daily well dressed and fed, but that he should not be led forth to water, nor any admitted to see him without directions from his keeper. The camels are to be daily grazed in the park, but brought back at night with all possible precautions to secure them from the vulgar gaze. The elephant had two Spaniards and two Englishmen to take care of him, and the royal quadruped had royal fare. His keepers affirm that from the month of September till April he must drink not water but wyne; and from April to September “he must have a gallon of wyne the day.” His winter allowance was six bottles per diem, but perhaps his keepers relieved him occasionally of a portion of the tempting beverage which they probably thought too good to waste on an animal even if it be a royal elephant.

When Voltaire was living near Geneva he owned a large monkey which used to attack and even bite both friends and enemies. This repulsive pet one day gave his master three wounds in the leg, obliging him for some time to hobble on crutches. He had named the creature Luc, and in conversation with intimate friends he also gave the King of Prussia the same name, because, said he, “Frederick is like my monkey, who bites those who caress him.” As a contrast, remember how the hermit, Thoreau, used to cultivate the acquaintance of a little mouse until it became really tame and would play a game of bopeep with his eccentric friend.

Nothing seems too odd or disagreeable to be regarded with affection. Lord Erskine, who always expressed a great interest in animals, had at one time two leeches for favourites. Taken dangerously ill at Portsmouth, he fancied that they had saved his life. Every day he gave them fresh water and formed a friendship with them. He said he was sure that both knew him, and were grateful for his attentions. He named them Home and Cline, for two celebrated surgeons, and he affirmed that their dispositions were quite different; in fact, he thought he distinguished individuality in these black squirmers from the mire.

Even pigs have had the good fortune to interest persons of genius. Robert Herrick had a pet pig which he fed daily with milk from a silver tankard, and Miss Martineau had the same odd fancy. She, too, had a pet pig which she had washed and scrubbed daily. When too ill to superintend the operation she would listen at her window for piggie’s squeal, advertising that the operation had commenced.

John Wilson, better known as Christopher North, loved many pets, and was as unique in his methods with them as in all other things. His intense fondness for animals and birds was often a trial to the rest of the family, as when his daughter found he had made a nest for some young gamecocks in her trunk of party dresses which was stored in the attic. On his library table, where “fishing rods found company with Ben Jonson and Jeremy Taylor reposed near a box of barley-sugar,” a tame sparrow he had befriended hopped blithely about, master of the situation. This tiny pet imagined itself the most important occupant of the room. It would nestle in his waistcoat, hop upon his shoulder, and seemed influenced by constant association with a giant, for it grew in stature until it was alleged that the sparrow was gradually becoming an eagle.

The Rev. Gilbert White, who wrote the Natural History of Selborne, speaks of a tortoise which he petted, saying, “I was much taken with its sagacity in discerning those that show it kind offices, for as soon as the good old lady comes in sight who has waited on it for more than thirty years, it hobbles toward its benefactress with awkward alacrity, but remains inattentive to strangers.” Thus not only “the ox knoweth his owner and the ass his master’s crib,” but the most abject reptile and torpid of beings distinguishes the hand that feeds it, and is touched with the feelings of gratitude. Think of Jeremy Bentham growing a sort of vetch in his garden to cram his pockets with to feed the deer in Kensington Gardens! “I remember,” says his friend who tells the story, “his pointing it out to me and telling me the virtuous deer were fond of it, and ate it out of his hand.” Like Byron, he once kept a pet bear, but he was in Russia at the time, and the wolves got into the poor creature’s box on a terrible night and carried off a part of his face, a depredation which the philosopher never forgot nor forgave to his dying day. He always kept a supply of stale bread in a drawer of his dining table for the “mousies.”

The Brownings had many pets, among them an owl, which after death was stuffed and given an honoured position in the poet’s library. Sydney Smith professed not to care for pets, especially disliking dogs; but he named his four oxen Tug and Lug, Haul and Crawl, and dosed them when he fancied they needed medicine. Miss Martineau relates that a phrenologist examining Sydney’s head announced, “This gentleman is a naturalist, always happy among his collections of birds and fishes.” “Sir,” said Sydney, turning upon him solemnly with wide-open eyes—“sir, I don’t know a fish from a bird.” But this ignorance and indifference were all assumed. His daughter, writing of his daily home life, says: “Dinner was scarcely over ere he called for his hat and stick and sallied forth for his evening stroll. Each cow and calf and horse and pig were in turn visited and fed and patted, and all seemed to welcome him; he cared for their comforts as he cared for the comforts of every living being around him.” He used to say: “I am for all cheap luxuries, even for animals; now, all animals have a passion for scratching their back bones; they break down your gates and palings to effect this. Look, this is my Universal Scratcher, a sharp-edged pole resting on a high and low post, adapted to every height, from a horse to a lamb. Even the Edinburgh Reviewer can take his turn; you have no idea how popular it is.” Who could resist repeating just here the wit’s impromptu epigram upon the sarcastic, diminutive Jeffrey when the caustic critic was surprised riding on the children’s pet donkey? “I still remember the joy-inspiring laughter that burst from my father at this unexpected sight, as, advancing toward his old friend, with a face beaming with delight, he exclaimed:

Witty as Horatius Flaccus,
As great a Jacobin as Gracchus,
Short, though not as fat as Bacchus,
Riding on a little jackass.”

Before saying good-bye to the donkey I must give the appeal of Mr. Evarts’s little daughter at their summer home in Windsor, Vermont, to her learned and judicial father; so naïve and irresistible:

“Dear Papa: Do come home soon. The donkey is so lonesome without you!”

I once heard Mr. Evarts lamenting to Chief-Justice Chase that he had been badly beaten at a game of High Low Jack by Ben, the learned pig. “I know now,” said he, “why two pipes are called a hog’s head. It is on account of their great capacity!”

One would fancy that a busy lawyer would have no time to give to pets, but this is far from true. Burnet, in his life of Sir Matthew Hale, the most eminent lawyer in the time of Charles I and Cromwell, says of him, that “his mercifulness extended even to his beasts, for when the horses that he had kept long grew old, he would not suffer them to be sold or much wrought, but ordered his man to turn them loose on his grounds and put them only to easy work, such as going to market and the like. He used old dogs also with the same care; his shepherd having one that was blind with age, he intended to have killed or lost him, but the judge coming to hear of it made one of his servants bring him home and feed him till he died. And he was scarce ever seen more angry than with one of his servants for neglecting a bird that he kept so that it died for want of food.”

Daniel Webster’s fondness for animals is well known. When his friends visited him at Marshfield the first excursion they must take would be to his barns and pastures, where he would point out the beauties of an Alderney, and mention the number of quarts she gave daily, with all a farmer’s pride, adding, “I know, for I measured it myself.” Choate used to tell a story à propos of this. Once, when spending the Sabbath at Marshfield, he went to his room after breakfast to read. Soon there came an authoritative knock at the door, and Mr. Webster shouted, “What are you doing, Choate?” He replied, “I’m reading.” “Oh,” said Webster, “come down and see the pigs.”

He would often rout up his son Fletcher at a provokingly early hour to go out and hold a lantern while he fed the oxen with nubs of corn; and, noticing a decided lack of enthusiasm in Fletcher, would say: “You do not enjoy this society, my son; it’s better than I find in the Senate.” It was a touching scene when on the last day, when he sat in his loved library, he longed to look once more into the kindly faces of his honest oxen, and had them driven up to the window to say good-bye. Speaking of Choate recalls a comical story about his finding in his path, during a summer morning’s walk, a dozen or more dorbeetles sprawling on their backs in the highway enjoying the warm sunshine. With great care he tipped them all over into a normal position, when a friend coming along asked curiously, “What are you doing, Mr. Choate?” “Why, these poor creatures got overturned, and I am helping them to take a fresh start.” “But,” said the other, “they do that on purpose; they are sunning themselves, and will go right back as they were.” This was a new idea to the puzzled pleader, but with one of those rare smiles which lit up his sad, dark face so wonderfully, he said: “Never mind, I’ve put them right; if they go back, it is at their own risk.” And an interesting anecdote is told in his biography of his touch of human sympathy for inanimate objects: “When as a boy he drove his father’s cows, he says, more than once when he had thrown away his switch, he has returned to find it, and has carried it back and thrown it under the tree from which he took it, for he thought, ‘Perhaps there is, after all, some yearning of Nature between them still.’”

There are enough anecdotes about birds as pets to fill another big book. One of Dickens’s most delightful characters was ponderous, impetuous Lawrence Boythorn, with his pet bird lovingly circling about him. In Washington, in Salmon P. Chase’s home, when he was Secretary of the Treasury, lived a pet canary, one of the tamest, which had a special liking for the grave, reserved statesman. It was allowed to fly about the room freely, and had an invariable habit of calmly waiting beside the secretary at dinner until he had used his finger-bowl; then Master Canary would take possession of it for a bath. In Jean Paul Richter’s study stood a table with a cage of canaries. Between this and his writing table ran a little ladder, on which the birds could hop their way to the poet’s shoulder, where they frequently perched.

Celia Thaxter loved birds. She writes: “I can not express to you my distress at the destruction of the birds. You know how I love them; every other poem I have written has some bird for its subject, and I look at the ghastly horror of women’s headgear with absolute suffering. I remonstrate with every wearer of birds. No woman worthy of the name would wish to be instrumental in destroying the dear, beautiful creatures, and for such idle folly—to deck their heads like squaws—who are supposed to know no better—when a ribbon or a flower would serve their purpose just as well, and not involve this fearful sacrifice.” In a letter she describes a night visit from birds.

“Two or three of the earlier were down in the big bay window, and between two and three o’clock in the morning it began softly to rain, and all at once the room filled with birds: song sparrows, flycatchers, wrens, nuthatches, yellow birds, thrushes, all kinds of lovely feathered creatures fluttered in and sat on picture frames and gas fixtures, or whirled, agitated, in mid air, while troops of others beat their heads against the glass outside, vainly striving to get in. The light seemed to attract them as it does the moths. We had no peace, there was such a crowd, such cries and chirps and flutterings. I never heard of such a thing; did you?

“Oh, the birds! I do believe few people enjoy them as you and I do. The song sparrows and white-throats follow after me like chickens when they see me planting. The martins almost light on my head; the humming birds do, and tangle their little claws in my hair; so do the sparrows. I wish somebody were here to tell me the different birds, and recognise these different voices. There are more birds than usual this year, I am happy to say. The women have not assassinated them all for the funeral pyres they carry on their heads.... What between the shrikes and owls and cats and weasels and women—worst of all—I wonder there’s a bird left on this planet.

“In the yard of the house at Newton, where we used to live, I was in the habit of fastening bones (from cooked meat) to a cherry tree which grew close to my sitting-room window; and when the snow lay thick upon the ground that tree would be alive with blue jays and chickadees, and woodpeckers, red-headed and others, and sparrows (not English), and various other delightful creatures. I was never tired watching them and listening to them. The sweet housekeeping of the martins in the little boxes on my piazza roof is more enchanting to me than the most fascinating opera, and I worship music. I think I must have begun a conscious existence as some kind of a bird in æons past. I love them so! I am always up at four, and I hear everything every bird has to say on any subject whatever. Tell me, have you ever tied mutton and beef bones to the trees immediately around the house where you live for the birds?”

Matthew Arnold wrote of his canary and cat in a most loving way.

Poor Matthias.

Poor Matthias! Found him lying
Fallen beneath his perch and dying?
Found him stiff, you say, though warm,
All convulsed his little form?
Poor canary, many a year
Well he knew his mistress dear;
Now in vain you call his name,
Vainly raise his rigid frame.

Vainly warm him in your heart,
Vainly kiss his golden crest,
Smooth his ruffled plumage fine,
Touch his trembling beak with wine.
One more gasp, it is the end,
Dead and mute our tiny friend.

Poor Matthias, wouldst thou have
More than pity? Claim’st a stave?
Friends more near us than a bird
We dismissed without a word.
Rover with the good brown head,
Great Attossa, they are dead;
Dead, and neither prose nor rhyme
Tells the praises of their prime.

Thou hast seen Attossa sage
Sit for hours beside thy cage;
Thou wouldst chirp, thou foolish bird,
Flutter, chirp, she never stirred.
What were now these toys to her?
Down she sank amid her fur;
Eyed thee with a soul resigned,
And thou deemedst cats were kind.
Cruel, but composed and bland,
Dumb, inscrutable and grand,
So Tiberius might have sat
Had Tiberius been a cat.

Fare thee well, companion dear,
Fare forever well, nor fear,
Tiny though thou art, to stray
Down the uncompanioned way.
We without thee, little friend,
Many years have yet to spend;
What are left will hardly be
Better than we spent with thee.

Maclise was one of the intimate associates, if we may use the expression, of Dickens’s celebrated Raven. The letter in which the bereaved owners announced to Maclise the death of this interesting bird has been published, but the reply of the artist is now printed for the first time:

“March 13, 1841.

“My dear Dickens: I received the mournful intelligence of our friend’s decease last night at eleven, and the shock was great indeed. I have just dispatched the announcement to poor Forster, who will, I am sure, sympathize deeply with our bereavement.

“I know not what to think is the probable cause of his death—I reject the idea of the Butcher Boy, for the orders he must have in his (the Raven’s) lifetime received on acct. of the Raven himself must have been considerable—I rather cling to the notion of felo de se, but this will no doubt come out upon the post mortem. How blest we are to have such an intelligent coroner in Mr. Wakely! I think he was just of those grave, melancholic habits which are the noticeable signs of your intended suicide—his solitary life—those gloomy tones, when he did speak—which was always to the purpose, witness his last dying speech—‘Hallo, old girl!’ which breathes of cheerfulness and triumphant resignation—his solemn suit of raven black which never grew rusty—altogether his character was the very prototype of a Byron Hero and even of a Scott—a master of Ravenswood——We ought to be glad he had his family, I suppose; he seems to have intended it, however, for his solicitude to deposit in those Banks in the Garden his savings, were always very touching—I suppose his obsequies will take place immediately—It is beautiful—the idea of his return soon after death to the scene of his early youth and all his joyful associations, to lie with kindred dusts amid his own ancestral groves, after having come out and made such a noise in the world, having clearly booked his place in that immortality coach driven by Dickens.

“Yes, he committed suicide, he felt he had done it and done with life—the hundreds of years!! What were they to him? There was nothing near to live for—and he committed the rash act.

“Sympathizingly yours,

“D. Maclise.”

The pet dove of Thurlow Weed seemed inconsolable after his death. When any gentleman called at the house the bird would alight on his shoulder, coo, and peer into his face. Then finding it was not his dear friend, he would sadly seek some other perch. Miss Weed writes: “Since the day that father’s remains were carried away, the affectionate creature has been seeking for his master. He flies through every room in the house, and fairly haunts the library. Many times every day the mourning bird comes and takes a survey of the room. He will tread over every inch of space on the lounge, and then go to the rug, over which he will walk repeatedly, as if in expectation of his dead master’s coming. Does not this seem akin to human grief?”

Whittier wrote a good deal about his pet parrot. Read his poem called “The Bird’s Question.” After his tragic end, the Quaker bard wrote of him: “I have met with a real loss. Poor Charlie is dead. He has gone where the good parrots go. He has been ailing and silent for some time, and he finally died. Do not laugh at me, but I am sorry enough to cry if it would do any good. He was an old friend. Lizzie liked him. And he was the heartiest, jolliest, pleasantest old fellow I ever saw.” He used to perch upon the back of his master’s chair at meal time; at times disgracefully profane, especially when in moments of extreme excitement he would climb to the steeple by way of the lightning rod, and there he would dance and sing and swear on a Sunday morning, amusing the passer-by and shocking his owner. At last he fell down the chimney, and was not discovered for two days. He was rescued in the middle of the night, and, although he partially recovered, he soon died. Whittier said: “We buried poor Charlie decently. If there is a parrot’s paradise he ought to go there.” He also had a pet Bantam rooster which would perch on his shoulder, and liked to be buttoned up in his coat. Grace Greenwood in Heads or Tails speaks of a diplomatic parrot belonging to Seward, at Washington, taking part in political discussion, trying to scream Sumner down, and so sympathetic that when his master had a cough he had symptoms of bronchitis.

In a trustworthy collection of epitaphs may be found this quaint tribute with old-fashioned formality to a pet bird:

“Here lieth, aged three months, the body of Richard Acanthus, a young person of unblemished character. He was taken in his callow infancy from the wing of a tender parent by the rough and pitiless hand of a two-legged animal without feathers.

“Though born with the most aspiring disposition and unbending love of freedom he was closely confined in a grated prison, and scarcely permitted to view those fields of which he had an undoubted charter.

“Deeply sensible of this infringement of his natural rights, he was often heard to petition for redress in the most plaintive notes of harmonious sorrow. At length his imprisoned soul burst the prison which his body could not, and left a lifeless heap of beauteous feathers.

“If suffering innocence can hope for retribution, deny not to the gentle shade of this unfortunate captive the humble though uncertain hope of animating some happier form; or trying his new-fledged pinions in some happy Elysium, beyond the reach of Man, the tyrant of this lower world.”

Few women are so fond of pets as Sarah Bernhardt. She carries five or six with her in all her travels. When in New York the French actress has apartments at the Hoffman House. When the writer last visited her there he was received, upon entering the sitting room, by half a dozen dogs, ranging in size and species from the massive St. Bernard to the tiny, shivering black and tan.

The actress rose from a low divan and extended one hand to her guest while she pressed two very small snakes to her bosom with the other. After she had resumed her seat upon the divan, and while conversing, she fondled the snakes or allowed them to squirm at will over her person.

In reply to questions, Madame Bernhardt said that the snakes were used in the famous scene where Cleopatra presses the asp to her bosom and dies. The actress explained that the snakes with which she was playing were presented to her by a gentleman in Philadelphia. She spoke regretfully of the death of the snakes which she had brought with her from France, and which had succumbed to the hardships of the ocean voyage.

Emily Crawford tells some good stories about “The Elder Dumas,” the most dashingly picturesque character, surely, in the whole range of literature. We quote a paragraph showing Dumas’s fondness for animals:

“At his architectural folly of Monte Cristo, near Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which he built at a cost of upward of seven hundred thousand francs, and sold for thirty-six thousand francs in 1848, Dumas had uninclosed grounds and gardens, which, with the house, afforded lodgings and entertainment not only to a host of Bohemian ‘sponges,’ but to all the dogs, cats, and donkeys that chose to quarter themselves in the place. It was called by the neighbours ‘la Maison de Bon Dieu.’ There was a menagerie in the park, peopled by three apes; Jugurtha, the vulture, whose transport from Africa, whence Dumas fetched him, cost forty thousand francs (it would be too long to tell why); a big parrot called Duval; a macaw named Papa, and another christened Everard; Lucullus, the golden pheasant; Cæsar, the game-cock; a pea-fowl and a guinea-fowl; Myeouf II, the Angora cat, and the Scotch pointer, Pritchard. This dog was a character. He was fond of canine society, and used to sit in the road looking out for other dogs to invite them to keep him company at Monte Cristo. He was taken by his master to Ham to visit Louis Napoleon when a prisoner there. The latter wished to keep Pritchard, but counted without the intelligence of the animal in asking Dumas before his face to leave him behind. The pointer set up a howl so piteous that the governor of the prison withdrew the authorization he had given his captive to retain him.”

It is difficult to think of any created thing that has not been found sufficiently interesting to be petted by some one!

Pliny tells us of a cow that followed a Pythagorean philosopher on all his travels. Proud Wolsey was on familiar terms with a venerable carp. St. Anthony had a fondness for pigs. Frank Buckland took to rats. Buffon’s toad has become historical. Clive owned a pet tortoise. Gautier wrote of his lizards, magpie, and chameleon. Butterflies and crickets have been domesticated and found responsive. Rosa Bonheur used to be always escorted by two great dogs, one on either side, while in her home a favourite monkey played upon her staircase, and amused visitors with its gambols and pranks. Cowper doffed his melancholy to play with hares, and immortalized his rather ungrateful pensioners in verse:

Well—one at least is safe. One sheltered hare
Has never heard the sanguinary yell
Of cruel man, exulting in her woes,
Innocent partner of my peaceful home,
Whom ten long years’ experience of my care
Has made at last familiar; she has lost
Much of her vigilant instinctive dread,
Not needful here, beneath a roof like mine.

Yes—thou mayst eat thy bread, and lick the hand

That feeds thee; thou mayst frolic on the floor

At ev’ning, and at night retire secure

To thy straw couch, and slumber unalarmed;

For I have gained thy confidence, have pledged

All that is human in me, to protect
Thine unsuspecting gratitude and love.
If I survive thee, I will dig thy grave;
And, when I place thee in it, sighing say,
I knew at least one hare that had a friend.

James M. Hoppin, in his Old England, tells of his visit to Olney, where Cowper lived. He went to the rooms where he kept his hares, Puss, Bess, and Tiny; of the veteran survivor of this famous trio he says Cowper wrote:

Though duly from my hand he took
His pittance every night,
He did it with a jealous look,
And when he could, would bite.

Dr. John Hall was seen trudging through Central Park last winter, followed by a troop of frisky little gay squirrels. He had been feeding nuts to them, and they scattered the snow in clouds as they scampered along hoping to get more.

It would be interesting to quote from very many distinguished persons who believe in the immortality of the lower animals.

Lord Shaftesbury says: “I have ever believed in a happy future for animals. I can not say or conjecture how or where, but sure I am that the love so manifested, by dogs especially, is an emanation from the Divine essence, and as such it can, or rather it will, never be extinguished.”

Frances Power Cobbe wrote: “I entirely believe in a higher existence hereafter, both for myself and for those whose less happy lives on earth entitle them far more to expect it, from eternal love and justice.”

Mr. Somerville said: “The dear animals I believe we shall meet. They suffer so often here they must live again! Pain seems a poor proof of immortality, but it is used by theologians, and we find many great souls who believe and hope that animals may also have another life. Agassiz believed in this firmly. Bishop Butler saw no reason why the latent powers and capacities of the lower animals should not be developed in the future, and in his Analogy of Religion he endeavoured to carry out this train of thought, and to show that the lower animals do possess those mental and moral characteristics which we admit in ourselves to belong to the immortal spirit and not to the perishable body.”

The Rev. J. G. Wood has written a most interesting book on Man and Beast: Here and Hereafter, with the especial aim of proving the immortality of the brute creation, showing that they share with man the attributes of reason, language, memory, a sense of moral responsibility, unselfishness, and love, all of which belong to the spirit and not to the body.

Bayard Taylor says, “If one should surmise a lower form of spiritual being yet equally indestructible, who need take alarm?” “Yea, they have all one breath, so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast, for all is vanity,” said the Preacher, more than two thousand years ago. In Taylor’s poem to an old horse, Ben Equus, which died on the farm when he was a young man, he uses the same idea:

For I may dream fidelity like thine,
May save some essence in thee from decay,
That, not neglected by the Soul Divine,
Thy being rises on some unknown way.

Some intermediate heaven, where fields are fresh,

And golden stables littered deep with fern;

Where fade the wrongs that horses knew in flesh,

And all the joys that horses felt return.

Mrs. Charles writes:

Is all this lost in nothingness,
Such gladness, love, and hope, and trust,
Such busy thought our thoughts to guess,
All trampled into common dust?

Or is there something yet to come
From all our science all concealed,
About the patient creatures dumb
A secret yet to be revealed?

Writing of the death of a favourite spaniel, Southey expresses the same faith:

... Mine is no narrow creed,
And he that gave thee being did not frame
The mystery of life to be the sport
Of merciless man. There is another world
For all that live and move—a better one,
Where the proud bipeds who would fain confine
Infinite Goodness to the little bounds
Of their own charity, may envy thee.

Mrs. Mary Somerville wrote these words at the age of eighty-nine: “If animals have no future, the existence of many is most wretched. Multitudes are starved, cruelly beaten, and loaded during life; many die under a barbarous vivisection. I can not believe that any creature was created for uncompensated misery; it would be contrary to the attributes of God’s mercy and justice. I am sincerely happy to find that I am not the only believer in the immortality of the lower animals.” Lamartine has the same thought in an address to his dog, and many other wise men have hoped that such a future was a reality.

The Rev. Henry Storrs says it is wisest to treat animals kindly, because, if we are ever to meet them again, it will be pleasanter to have them on our side.

Henry Ward Beecher many times owned his love for horses, as in his one novel, Norwood:

“I tell you,” said Hiram, turning slightly toward the doctor, “these horses are jest as near human as is good for ’em. A good horse has sense jest as much as a man has; and he’s proud, too, and he loves to be praised, and he knows when you treat him with respect. A good horse has the best p’ints of a man without his failin’s.”

“What do you think becomes of horses, Hiram, when they die?” said Rose.

“Wal, Miss Rose, it’s my opinion that there’s use for horses hereafter, and that you’ll find there’s a horse-heaven. There’s Scripture for that, too.”

“Ah!” said Rose, a little surprised at these confident assertions. “What Scripture do you mean?”

“Why, in the Book of Revelation! Don’t it give an account of a white horse, and a red horse, and black horses, and gray horses? I’ve allers s’posed that when it said Death rode on a pale horse, it must have been gray, ’cause it had mentioned white once already. In the ninth chapter, too, it says there was an army of two hundred thousand horsemen. Now, I should like to know where they got so many horses in heaven, if none of ’em that die off here go there? It’s my opinion that a good horse’s a darned sight likelier to go to heaven than a bad man!”

When we see the superiority of a noble horse to his brutal or drunken driver, it seems at least possible, and most of us have lost some pet that we would rather meet again than the majority of our acquaintances.

Helen Barron Bostwick, after “burying her pretty brown mare under the cherry tree,” inquires:

Is this the end?

Do you know?

and closes her poem as follows:

Is there aught of harm believing,
That, some newer form receiving,
They may find a wider sphere,
Live a larger life than here?
That the meek, appealing eyes,
Haunted by strange mysteries,
Find a more extended field,
To new destinies unsealed;
Or, that in the ripened prime
Of some far-off summer time,
Ranging that unknown domain,
We may find our pets again.

Sir Edwin Arnold has translated much that is touching about those who are devoted to animals. A sinful woman led out to die by stoning was pardoned by the king, because of her pity, even at that terrible crisis, for a dying dog:

Glaring upon the water out of reach,
And praying succor in a silent speech,
So piteous were its eyes which, when she saw,
This woman from her foot her shoe did draw,
Albeit death-sorrowful, and looping up
The long silk of her girdle, made a cup
Of the heel’s hollow, and thus let it sink

Until it touched the cool, black water’s brink,

So filled the embroidered shoe and gave a draught

To the spent beast.

This brute beast
Testifies for thee, sister! whose weak breast
Death could not make ungentle. I hold rule
In Allah’s stead, who is the merciful,
And hope for mercy; therefore go thou free—
I dare not show less pity unto thee!

We send missionaries to the East to teach those who in some respects are well fitted by their pure lives, exalted aims, and mercy toward the brute creation to instruct us. How exquisite the story of the man who would not enter heaven and leave his dog behind!

But the king answered: “O thou Wisest One,

Who knowest what was, and is, and is to be,

Still one more grace: this hound hath ate with me,

Followed me, loved me: must I leave him now?”

“Monarch,” spake Indra, “thou art now as we—
Deathless, divine—thou art become a god;
Glory and power and gifts celestial,
And all the joys of heaven are thine for aye.

What hath a beast with these? Leave here thy hound.”

Yet Yudhishthira answered: “O Most High,
O thousand-eyed and wisest; can it be
That one exalted should seem pitiless?
Nay, let me lose such glory: for its sake
I would not leave one living thing I loved.”

Then sternly Indra spake: “He is unclean,

And into Swarga such shall enter not.

The Krodhavasha’s hand destroys the fruits

Of sacrifice, if dogs defile the fire.

Bethink thee, Dharmaraj, quit now this beast;

That which is seemly is not hard of heart.”

Still he replied: “’Tis written that to spurn

A suppliant equals in offence to slay

A twice-born; wherefore, not for Swarga’s bliss

Quit I, Mahendra, this poor clinging dog.
So without any hope or friend save me,
So wistful, fawning for my faithfulness,
So agonized to die, unless I help
Who among men was called steadfast and just.”

Quoth Indra: “Nay, the altar flame is foul
Where a dog passeth; angry angels sweep
The ascending smoke aside, and all the fruits
Of offering, and the merit of the prayer
Of him whom a hound toucheth. Leave it here;
He that will enter heaven must enter pure.
Why didst thou quit thy brethren on the way,
And Krishna, and the dear-loved Draupadi,
Attaining firm and glorious, to this mount
Through perfect deeds, to linger for a brute?
Hath Yudhishthira vanquished self, to melt
With one poor passion at the door of bliss?

Stay’st thou for this, who didst not stay for them—

Draupadi, Bhima?”

But the king yet spake:

“’Tis known that none can hurt or help the dead.

They, the delightful ones, who sank and died,

Following my footsteps, could not live again

Though I had turned, therefore I did not turn;

But could help profit, I had turned to help.

There be four sins, O Sakra, grievous sins:

The first is making suppliants despair,

The second is to slay a nursing wife,

The third is spoiling Brahmans’ goods by force,

The fourth is injuring an ancient friend.

These four I deem but equal to one sin,

If one, in coming forth from woe to weal,

Abandon any meanest comrade then.”

Straight as he spake, brightly great Indra smiled;

Vanished the hound, and in its stead stood there

The Lord of Death and Justice, Dharma’s self.

Sweet were the words that fell from those dread lips,

Precious the lovely praise: “O thou true king,

Thou that dost bring to harvest the true seed
Of Pandu’s righteousness; thou that hast ruth
As he before, on all which lives! O son,
I tried thee in the Dwaita wood, what time
They smote thy brothers, bringing water; then

Thou prayed’st for Nakula’s life, tender and just,

Not Bhima’s nor Arjuna’s, true to both,

To Madri as to Kunti, to both queens.

Hear thou my word: Because thou didst not mount

This car divine, lest the poor hound be shent

Who looked to thee—lo! there is none in heaven

Shall sit above thee, King Bharata’s son!
Enter thou now to the eternal joys,
Living and in thy form. Justice and love

Welcome thee, monarch; thou shalt throne with them.”

As a farmer and butter-maker I want to condense a dissertation on The Intellectual Cow, taken from the London Spectator:

The writer resents the general impression that the cow is merely a food machine, and proves that she never yet has had justice done to her mental qualities, and is entitled to more respectful consideration.

Cows certainly possess decided individuality, and in every herd will be found a master mind which leads and domineers over the rest or acts as ringleader in mischief. They soon learn their own names, and will answer to them, and seldom make mistakes as to their own stalls. They are also undoubtedly influenced by affection, and will give down milk more freely to a friend than to one who is brutal in his manner.

Moreover, they enjoy petting just as much as humans, and will greet with delight those who bring offerings of potatoes or apple-parings or bits of bread, or who will give their heads and necks the luxury of a good rub.

Charles Dudley Warner, in Being a Boy, pays a glowing tribute to the Martial Turkey:

“Perhaps it is not generally known that we get the idea of some of our best military manœuvres from the turkey. The deploying of the skirmish line in advance of an army is one of them. The drum major of our holiday militia companies is copied exactly from the turkey gobbler: he has the same splendid appearance, the same proud step, and the same martial aspect. The gobbler does not lead his forces in the field, but goes behind them, like the colonel of a regiment, so that he can see every part of the line and direct its movements. This resemblance is one of the most singular things in natural history. I like to watch the gobbler manœuvring his forces in a grasshopper field. He throws out his company of two dozen turkeys in a crescent-shaped skirmish line, the number disposed at equal distances, while he walks majestically in the rear. They advance rapidly, picking right and left, with military precision, killing the foe and disposing of the dead bodies with the same peck. Nobody has yet discovered how many grasshoppers a turkey will hold; but he is very much like a boy at a Thanksgiving dinner—he keeps on eating as long as the supplies last. The gobbler, in one of these raids, does not condescend to grab a single grasshopper—at least, not while anybody is watching him. But I suppose he makes up for it when his dignity can not be injured by having spectators of his voracity; perhaps he falls upon the grasshoppers when they are driven into a corner of the field. But he is only fattening himself for destruction; like all greedy persons, he comes to a bad end. And if the turkeys had any Sunday school, they would be taught this.”

Josh Billings, in his Animile Statistix, proved that he had been a close observer. He says in this comical medley:

“Kats are affectionate, they luv young chickens, sweet kream, and the best place in front of the fireplace.

“Dogs are faithful; they will stick to a bone after everybody haz deserted it.

“The ox knoweth hiz master’s krib, and that iz all he duz kno or care about hiz master.

“Munkeys are imitatiff, but if they kan’t imitate some deviltry they ain’t happy.

“The goose is like all other phools—alwuss seems anxious to prove it.

“Ducks are only cunning about one thing: they lay their eggs in sitch sly places that sumtimes they kan’t find them again themselfs.

“The mushrat kan foresee a hard winter and provide for it, but he kan’t keep from gittin ketched in the sylliest kind ov a trap.

“Hens know when it is a going to rain, and shelter themselfs, but they will try to hatch out a glass egg just az honest az they will one ov their own.

“The cuckcoo iz the greatest ekonemist among the birds, she lays her eggs in other birds’ nests, and lets them hatch them out at their leizure.

“Rats hav fewer friends and more enemies than anything ov the four-legged purswashun on the face ov the earth, and yet rats are az plenty now az in the palmyest days ov the Roman Empire.

“The horse alwuss gits up from the ground on his fore legs first, the kow on her hind ones, and the dog turns round 3 times before he lies down.

“The kangaroo he jumps when he walks, the coon paces when he trots, the lobster travels backwards az fast az he does forward.

“The elephant has the least, and the rabbit the most eye for their size, and a rat’s tale is just the length ov hiz boddy.”

The very latest item of interest to dog-lovers is the announcement that Bismarck has purchased a two-pound King Charles spaniel from the dog show in Boston.

My collection is now as complete as the limitations of time and the publishers will allow. As proprietor, I beg leave to announce my Literary Zoo as now open at all hours (for a moderate fee) to those interested in what we call, with conceit and possibly ignorance, the inferior orders of creation, and the dumb brutes.

THE END.

D. APPLETON & CO.’S PUBLICATIONS.

SLEEPING FIRES. By George Gissing, author of “In the Year of Jubilee,” “Eve’s Ransom,” etc. 16mo. Cloth, 75 cents.

In this striking story the author has treated an original motive with rare self-command and skill. His book is most interesting as a story, and remarkable as a literary performance.

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“The story runs on as smoothly as a brook through lowlands; it excites your interest at the beginning and keeps it to the end.”—New York Herald.

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“There is intrigue enough in it for those who love a story of the ordinary kind, and the political part is perhaps more attractive in its sparkle and variety of incident than the real thing itself.”—London Daily News.

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A HARD WOMAN. A Story in Scenes. By Violet Hunt. 12mo. Cloth, $1.25.

“An extremely clever work. Miss Hunt probably writes dialogue better than any of our young novelists.... Not only are her conversations wonderfully vivacious and sustained, but she contrives to assign to each of her characters a distinct mode of speech, so that the reader easily identifies them, and can follow the conversations without the slightest difficulty.”—London Athenæum.

“One of the best writers of dialogue of our immediate day. The conversations in this book will enhance her already secure reputation.”—London Daily Chronicle.

AN IMAGINATIVE MAN. By Robert S. Hichens, author of “The Green Carnation,” etc. 12mo. Cloth, $1.25.

“One of the brightest books of the year.”—Boston Budget.

“Altogether delightful, fascinating, unusual.”—Cleveland Amusement Gazette.

“A study in character.... Just as entertaining as though it were the conventional story of love and marriage. The clever hand of the author of ‘The Green Carnation’ is easily detected in the caustic wit and pointed epigram.”—Jeannette L. Gilder, in the New York World.

TWO REMARKABLE AMERICAN NOVELS.

THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE. An Episode of the American Civil War. By Stephen Crane. 12mo. Cloth, $1.00.

“Mr. Stephen Crane is a great artist, with something new to say, and consequently with a new way of saying it.... In ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ Mr. Crane has surely contrived a masterpiece.... He has painted a picture that challenges comparison with the most vivid scenes of Tolstoy’s ‘La Guerre et la Paix’ or of Zola’s ‘La Débácle.’”—London New Review.

“In its whole range of literature we can call to mind nothing so searching in its analysis, so manifestly impressed with the stamp of truth, as ‘The Red Badge of Courage.’... A remarkable study of the average mind under stress of battle.... We repeat, a really fine achievement.”—London Daily Chronicle.

“Not merely a remarkable book: it is a revelation.... One feels that, with perhaps one or two exceptions, all previous descriptions of modern warfare have been the merest abstractions.”—St. James Gazette.

“Holds one irrevocably. There is no possibility of resistance when once you are in its grip, from the first of the march of the troops to the closing scenes.... Mr. Crane, we repeat, has written a remarkable book. His insight and his power of realization amount to genius.”—Pall Mall Gazette.

IN DEFIANCE OF THE KING. A Romance of the American Revolution. By Chauncey C. Hotchkiss. 12mo. Paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.

“The whole story is so completely absorbing that you will sit far into the night to finish it. You lay it aside with the feeling that you have seen a gloriously true picture of the Revolution.”—Boston Herald.

“The story is a strong one—a thrilling one. It causes the true American to flush with excitement, to devour chapter after chapter until the eyes smart; and it fairly smokes with patriotism.”—N. Y. Mail and Express.

“The heart beats quickly, and we feel ourselves taking part in the scenes described.... Altogether the book is an addition to American literature.”—Chicago Evening Post.

“One of the most readable novels of the year.... As a love romance it is charming, while it is filled with thrilling adventure and deeds of patriotic daring.”—Boston Advertiser.

“This romance seems to come the nearest to a satisfactory treatment in fiction of the Revolutionary period that we have yet had.”—Buffalo Courier.

“A clean, wholesome story, full of romance and interesting adventure.... Holds the interest alike by the thread of the story and by the incidents.... A remarkably well-balanced and absorbing novel.”—Milwaukee Journal.

GILBERT PARKER’S BEST BOOKS.

THE SEATS OF THE MIGHTY. Being the Memoirs of Captain Robert Moray, sometime an Officer in the Virginia Regiment, and afterward of Amherst’s Regiment. 12mo. Cloth, illustrated, $1.50.

For the time of his story Mr. Parker has chosen the most absorbing period of the romantic eighteenth-century history of Quebec. The curtain rises soon after General Braddock’s defeat in Virginia, and the hero, a prisoner in Quebec, curiously entangled in the intrigues of La Pompadour, becomes a part of a strange history, full of adventure and the stress of peril, which culminates only after Wolfe’s victory over Montcalm. The material offered by the life and history of old Quebec has never been utilized for the purposes of fiction with the command of plot and incident, the mastery of local color, and the splendid realization of dramatic situations shown in this distinguished and moving romance. The illustrations preserve the atmosphere of the text, for they present the famous buildings, gates, and battle-grounds as they appeared at the time of the hero’s imprisonment in Quebec.

THE TRAIL OF THE SWORD. A Novel. l2mo. Paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.

“Mr. Parker here adds to a reputation already wide, and anew demonstrates his power of pictorial portrayal and of strong dramatic situation and climax.”—Philadelphia Bulletin.

“The tale holds the reader’s interest from first to last, for it is full of fire and spirit, abounding in incident, and marked by good character-drawing.”—Pittsburg Times.

THE TRESPASSER. 12mo. Paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00.

“Interest, pith, force, and charm—Mr. Parker’s new story possesses all these qualities.... Almost bare of synthetical decoration, his paragraphs are stirring because they are real. We read at times—as we have read the great masters of romance—breathlessly.”—The Critic.

“Gilbert Parker writes a strong novel, but thus far this is his masterpiece.... It is one of the great novels of the year.”—Boston Advertiser.

THE TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE. 16mo. Flexible cloth, 75 cents.

“A book which no one will be satisfied to put down until the end has been matter of certainty and assurance.”—The Nation.

“A story of remarkable interest, originality, and ingenuity of construction.”—Boston Home Journal.

New York: D. APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.

2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.

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Table of Contents

- My Literary Zoo

- CONTENTS.

- EVERYBODY’S PETS.

- DEVOTED TO DOGS.

- Epitaph.

- Geist’s Grave.

- Kaiser Dead. April 6, 1887.

- Flush or Faunus.

- To Flush, my Dog.

- To my Dog Blanco.

- Incident

- Tribute

- CATS.

- Méry.

- Sonnet to a Cat:

- Grimalkin:

- A Cat Story.

- ALL SORTS.

- On the Death of Lesbia’s Sparrow.

- Poor Matthias.

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE