My Pets

Like my games, my stockings, and my frocks, they were home-made. We had no caged birds. Our yards and woods thrilled with bird-song all day long for eight months of the year, and mocking-birds filled June and July nights with music sweeter and more varied than the storied strain of the nightingale. I had never seen a canary, and knew nothing of him except as I had read of one in what I called a “pair of verses” to which I took a fancy. I used to sing them to a tune of my own making when grown-uppers were not listening:

“Mary had a little bird,
Feathers bright and yellow,
Slender legs upon my word
He was a pretty fellow.

“Sweetest songs he often sung
Which much delighted Mary,
And often where his cage was hung
She stood to hear Canary.”

I classed Mary ’Liza with the grown-uppers. She loved cats, adopting two when they were blind kittens, and bringing them up in just such staid habits as made her incomparable among children. At six months of age they would doze at her feet on the rug while she studied, or ciphered, or read aloud, or stitched upon those everlasting chemises. When she took a walk for exercise (she never ran, or hopped, or skipped) they trotted demurely in the path, beside or behind her, indifferent to butterflies and grasshoppers, and as intent upon Behavior as their mistress. They were always fat and sleek, and ate civilized victuals, bread, milk, and cooked meats cut into decent, miminy-piminy mouthfuls. Not one of them was ever known to commit the vulgarity of catching a mouse. Mary ’Liza considered it cruel, and eating raw flesh “a dirty habit.” She, the cats, and Dorinda composed a Happy Family in which barring the Rozillah episode no accidents ever happened.

From earliest childhood my love for living creatures as companions and pets was a passion that wrought much anguish to me, and more casualties in the dumb animal kingdom than would be credited, were I to set down the full tale of my bantlings, and the fate of each. At a tender age, I sturdily refused to “call mine” the downiest darlings of the poultry-yard. There would be a few weeks of having, and loving, and fattening, and then the axe and the bloody log at the woodpile, and the stormy tears of bereavement. It mattered not to Aunt ’Ritta that my foster-children had names to which they answered, that they would feed from my hand, and hop on my shoulder, and run quacking, or squawking, or piping, or chirping, at my heels across the yard, and follow me to the field like dogs. When the day and the hour always unexpected to me came, I “called and they answered not again,” until, taught by bitter experience, I “struck” petting tame and edible living things, once and finally.

The miniature menagerie I then set up on my own account, and, as I shall show, to the detriment of everything entered upon the rolls, was stocked principally by the services of my colored contingent.

Among the first inmates they all became patients in the long, or short run were two striped ground squirrels (chipmunks) who were caught in a box with a falling door, and presented to me by Barratier. He lent me the box to keep them in. I fed and watered them warily and successfully for a couple of days by lifting the door an inch, having previously rapped upon it to scare the prisoners to the other end, then slipping in the dish of water and the nuts, sugar, or fruit that were the day’s rations. Supposing that kindness and comfortable quarters had tamed them into appreciation of my services and intentions, I raised the door two inches higher on the third day, and took a good look at the beauties huddled trembling in their safe corner. Their bright eyes were alluring, their quiescence was encouraging. I spoke to them in dulcet accents, and advanced a friendly hand. They met it more than half-way, one leaping upon my bare arm, running up to my shoulder, and, with one bound over my head, regaining his lost freedom. I caught his less active brother by the tail as he was sneaking under the door, and held him tight. In a quarter-jiffy he whisked his little body around and dug his teeth into my finger, and, as I still held on to his tail, incontinently shed the skin of the same, leaving it in my grasp. The last I ever saw of him was the flaunt of a gory, ghastly pennant, as the bearer vanished under a heap of stones. I flung the bloody casing from me with abhorrence. Now I can hope that another grew upon the denuded bones. Then I hoped it would not. The insult was gross.

The immediate successor of the ingrates was a mouse bestowed upon me by one of the stable hands. I named the waif “Caspar Hauser” forthwith, being fresh from the perusal of the history of that engaging fraud, and inducted him into a spare rat-trap set about closely with wires. A horsehair sparrow’s nest was lined with raw cotton and put in one corner, a toy saucer of water in the other, and in the third a toy plate filled with cracked hickory nuts, interspersed with bits of sugar. Then I sat down upon the floor beside him, and began the business of taming him by getting him used to seeing me, cultivating his acquaintance by poking my finger between the bars, talking and singing to him, and endeavoring, by other ingenious devices, to make him feel at home. He scampered around the confines of his domicile, as in a treadmill, all the time I was thus employed, and could not be induced to touch his food.

Mary ’Liza and I had outgrown the trundle-bed, and had a room to ourselves upstairs. Into this I surreptitiously conveyed the improvised cage that night and hid it under the bed. When my bedfellow had fallen asleep, I got up softly, lighted a candle, and took a peep at my pet. He had gone regularly to bed after disposing of some of the nuts and scattering the remnants in every direction, and now lay curled up in the cotton-wool in the prettiest, most homelike way imaginable, fast asleep.

I hung over him, entranced. He was tamed! Before long he would be following me all over the house, playing hide-and-seek in corners, sitting upon his hind legs beside my plate at table, and nibbling such tidbits as I might give him. One particularly bright picture of our common future was of taking him to church, smuggling him into the pocket of my Sunday frock, and after settling myself comfortably upon my knees before a corner seat during the “long prayer,” taking Caspar Hauser out and letting him play on the bench. What a boon his society would be what a relief his antics while Mr. Lee droned through innumerable “We pray Thees!”

After I went back to bed I pursued these and other enchanting visions into dreamland. The next day I took Caspar Hauser into the garden for air and sunshine. His liveliness was something inconceivable by the human imagination. He chased himself frantically around the cage, regardless of my tender exhortations, until I began to fear that taming was a more tedious process than I had supposed. I set the cage upon the grass where the sun was hottest, withdrawing myself into the shade as less in need of light and warmth, and read a volume of Berquin’s Children’s Friend in full sight of Caspar Hauser. Whenever I turned a page I would stick my finger between the wires and chirrup encouragingly to the captive, all with a single eye to getting him used to me. His speed and staying powers were equally extraordinary, but I was cheered, when the forenoon was spent and I picked up the cage to take him in, by observing that he ran more deliberately and with occasional pauses. By the time I got him upstairs he lay down for a nap. He was still slumbering at my supper-time, and had not got his nap out when I went to bed, nor yet when breakfast was eaten and lessons said, next morning.

I had made up my mind by now that he was sick, and carried him into the garden once more. I had read that wild creatures physic themselves if allowed to seek such plants as instinct tells them are specifics for their ailments. Lifting Caspar Hauser from his woolly bed, I stroked him and called him by name. He was so tame by now that he did not struggle upon my palm. Only the rise and fall of his furry sides showed that he was alive. He was limp and helpless, and to me very lovable. I laid him upon a strip of turf hot with the sunshine that had steeped it for five hours. He had a liberal choice of healing herbs. Parsley, sage, mint, tansy, peppergrass, catnip, and sweet marjoram, rue and bergamot and balsam, flourished within a hundred lengths of his small body. While I watched him he stretched himself as a baby at awakening, and began to crawl weakly toward the tansy bed. To save him needless exertion I pulled a handful of the yellow heads and offered them to his inquisitive nose. Mam’ Chloe had given me tansy tea for a bad cold last winter. It tasted nasty, but I got well. Instinct had “indicated” tansy to Caspar Hauser. He refused the panacea dumbly, and made, still feebly, for the parsley patch. I let him go a yard or more, when, fearing lest he might lose himself in the maze of luxuriant herbage, I dragged him tenderly back by the tail to the hot turf.

He had grown so tame that he never moved again.

The funeral took place that afternoon. We buried him next to Musidora. I had had enough of vaults, regarding them, with reason, as uncertain places of sepulture for the presumably defunct. I had never heard, or read, of cremation. I had had the misfortune to break my slate a few days before, and the biggest fragment made a nice tombstone for Caspar Hauser. With a nail and with infinite toil I produced a suitable epitaph.

HERE LIES HIS AFLICTED MISS M. BURWELL’S FATHEFULL LIT TLE FREND AN D TAME PLA YFELOW AND SUFFERER C. H.

There was not room for the whole name, but, as I told my fellow-mourners when I read the inscription to them, since we all knew it, the omission was of no consequence. I could have wished that the slate had broken straight, so that the inscription would have gone in better. However, one cannot control circumstance when it takes the shape of a fracture.

Within twenty-four hours after Caspar Hauser’s decease he was succeeded by Bay. His name in its entirety, was Baffin’s Bay. The alliterative unctuousness of the title pleased me, as Mary ’Liza pronounced it smoothly in her geography lesson, the day on which Hamilcar, the carriage driver, drove over a young “old hare” in the road, and knocked one of the poor thing’s eyes out. It was taken up for dead, but presently began to kick, and the ownership reverted to me. It lived a week, and for hours at a time was so nearly comfortable as to eat sparingly of milk, lettuce, cabbage, and clover, with which I supplied it lavishly twice a day. I likewise treated the wounded eye with balsam-capeiva and balm of Gilead ointment, sovereign appliances for the bruises and cut fingers of that generation. A lemon box, with slats nailed across the front by faithful Barratier, was the hospital in which I laid Bay up for repairs. Him, too, I carried daily into the garden, for change of air. He condescended to approve of the parsley patch, limping through it as gracefully as the long tape tied to his right hind leg would allow.

When, upon the third day of his residence in civilized quarters, he had a convulsion in the very middle of the parsley patch, I thought it a playful antic, and was amused and gratified thereat. The second time this happened, James, the gardener, chanced to witness the performance and informed me, brutally, that “that old hyar had throwed a fit, and was boun’ to die ’fore long.

“That ‘ar lick on de side o’ de hade done de bizness fur him, sure. De brain am injerred. Mighty easy thing fur to injer a Molly Cottontail’s brain. He ain’t got much, an’ hit lies close to de top o’ de hade.”

For forty-eight hours before Bay died, the spasms were distressingly frequent, but I would not have him killed. James might be wrong. Good nursing and plenty of fresh air might bring my patient around. For fear my parents might insist that he should be put out of his misery, I removed the hospital to the playhouse, and gave him the range of the place, forbidding the colored children to tell what was going on. His agonies were nearly over when, in the distraction of anxiety, I took Cousin Frank Morton into confidence. He had ridden over with a message from Cousin Molly Belle.

(Have I mentioned that they had been married for six months?)

The message was to the effect that I must spend the day and night with her. My mother gave ready consent.

“Molly has been too pale for several days, and has little or no appetite,” she said, looking affectionately at me. “The change will do her good, and there is no other place where she enjoys a visit more than at your house. Molly! can’t you thank Cousin Frank for taking the trouble to come for you?”

Strained by conflicting emotions, I fidgeted awkwardly about Cousin Frank’s chair, pinching the hem of my apron into folds, and shifting from one foot to the other.

“I want to go dreadfully!” I got out at length, almost ready to cry. “But Cousin Frank wouldn’t you like to look at Bay? He’s an old hare that I am taming.”

While speaking, I started for the door, and he came after me. My mother exclaimed, provoked, yet laughing, that I was “getting more ridiculous every day,” but I knew my man, and did not stop.

Bay was throwing a particularly hard fit when we got to him. His cries had something humanlike in them that pierced ears and heart.

“My dear child!” uttered the shocked visitor. “How long has this been going on?”

Upon hearing that the poor thing had never seemed really well from the day he was hurt, and had been “going on like this for four days, hand-running,” he was quite angry for him.

“I wonder that your mother let you keep him when he was in this state,” he said seriously; and, seeing the tears I could not drive back, he sat down on my chair and drew me up to him. “It would be better to kill the poor creature, at once, dear. He can never be better.”

I begged him not to tell my mother about Bay’s sickness. I had become very fond of him, and he was so sweet and patient and tame, and I just couldn’t bear to have him killed. Whether he would have granted my petition or not was not to be tested. While I was speaking, Bay uttered a shrill scream, leaped up high in the air, and fell over on his back, dead.

We hurried on the funeral that I might go home with Cousin Frank that evening. I pulled up the tombstone from the head of Caspar Hauser’s grave and made an epitaph on the other side for Bay. There might not be another slate broken in the family for months. At the present rate of mortality among my pensioners, it behooved me to be economical. I had not time to indite such an elaborate testimonial to the worth of the deceased as graced Caspar Hauser’s last resting-place. Yet I thought the tribute not amiss, and the drop into poetry elated me and electrified my audience. The lines were engraved perpendicularly upon the slate to give the rhyme effective room:

“Alas! and Alack A DAY!
Poor Litle BAFFINS BAY!”

My visit lasted three days instead of one and a half. I brought back with me something worthy of the pride that swelled my happy heart to aching. One of Cousin Frank’s men had taken two young hares alive, and given them to his mistress a week ago, and she and Cousin Frank had arranged a pleasant surprise for me. Before I had been in the house an hour I was taken to the dining room to see the dear little things already housed in a cage, made by the plantation carpenter. None of your lemon-box makeshifts, but a strong case in the shape of a cottage, of planed wood, painted white on the outside. There were two rooms in it with a round door in the dividing wall. One was half full of soft, sweet-smelling hay for Darby and Joan to sleep upon. Their names were ready-made, too. The other room was a parlor where they were to eat and to live in the daytime. Broad leather straps by which the box could be carried were made to look like chimneys.

The whole family collected to admire my treasures when I got home, and Mary ’Liza was so much interested in Darby and Joan that she brought up her cats, Cinderella and Preciosa, to be introduced and make friends with “their new cousins” so she said. Cinderella was black-and-white, Preciosa yellow-and-white, very large, and with long fur as soft and fine as raw silk. Mary ’Liza put them down close to the cottage.

“You must be very good and never hurt either of the beautiful hares you hear?” she said, and we all looked on to see what they would do.

Bless your soul! they walked once around the cottage in a lazy, indifferent, supercilious way, hardly glancing at their “new cousins,” then Preciosa yawned, tiptoed back to her place on the rug, doubled her toes in under her, and half closed her “greenery-yallery” eyes in real, or simulated slumber. Cinderella purred about her mistress until she seated herself again to work upon her seventh chemise, then jumped up into her lap and composed herself to slumber.

After that, I had no fear that the well-fed, pampered creatures would molest my pets. Everybody sympathized in my good fortune. The weather was intensely warm, and Uncle Ike’s own august hands rigged up a shelf against the garden fence, making what I called a “situation” for my cottage. Not even Argus could get at them there, had he been evilly disposed, and he had excellent principles for a puppy. Darby and Joan nibbled lettuce and cabbage from my fingers inside of three days, and if they were in the bedroom when I approached their dwelling, would bustle out to see if it were milk, or greens, or, maybe, clover blossoms that I had for them.

The happy, happy days went by, and I announced to my father one evening as we sat at supper that I really “began to believe the curse was lifted from my pets.”

“The curse! Mary Hobson Burwell! what a word!” cried my mother.

My father held up his hand.

“One moment, if you please, mother! Explain yourself, Molly!”

“I mean,” answered I, bravely, “that it used to seem as if a wicked fairy had cursed a curse upon anything I took a fancy to. Like the girl in the song, and her tree and flower, and dear gazelle, you know. But Darby and Joan make me hope ”

The words were blasted upon my tongue by a terrible scream.