it was not the London of the Romans, the Saxons, or the Normans, or the
London of the Plantagenets or the Tudors, but the London of the
Micawbers and the Traddleses, the London of Murdstone and Grinby, the
London of Dora's Aunt and of Jip. On his arrival at Euston Station the
first object upon which his eyes fell was a donkey-cart, a large wooden
tray on wheels, driven, at a rapid pace, by a long-legged young man, and
followed, at a pace hardly so rapid, by a boy of about his own age, who
seemed in great mental distress. This was the opening scene. And London,
from that moment, became to him, and still remains, a great moving
panorama of David Copperfield.
He saw the Orfling, that first evening, snorting along Tottenham Court
Road; he saw Mealy Potatoes, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, lounging
along Broad Street; he saw Martha disappear swiftly and silently into
one of the dirty streets leading from Seven Dials; he saw innumerable
public-houses--the Lion, or the Lion and something else--in anyone of
which David might have consumed that memorable glass of Genuine Stunning
ale with a good head on it. As they drove through St. Martin's Lane, and
past a court at the back of the church, he even got a glimpse of the
exterior of the shop where was sold a special pudding, made of currants,
but dear; a two-pennyworth being no larger than a pennyworth of more
ordinary pudding at any other establishment in the neighborhood. And, to
crown all, when he looked out of his back bedroom window, at Morley's
Hotel, he discovered that he was looking at the actual bedroom windows
of the Golden Cross on the Strand, in which Steerforth and little
Copperfield had that disastrous meeting which indirectly brought so much
sorrow to so many innocent men and women.
This was but the beginning of countless similar experiences, and the
beginning of a love for Landmarks of a more important but hardly of a
more delightful character. Hungerford Market and Hungerford Stairs, with
the blacking-warehouse abutting on the water when the tide was in, and
on the mud when the tide was out, still stood near Morley's in 1852; and
very close to them stood then, and still stands to-day, the old house in
Buckingham Street, Adelphi, where, with Mrs. Crupp, Trotwood Copperfield
found his lodgings when he began his new life with Spenlow and Jorkins.
These chambers, once the home of Clarkson Stanfield, and since of Mr.
William Black and of Dr. B. E. Martin, became, in later days, very
familiar to The Boy, and still are haunted by the great crowd of the
ghosts of the past. The Boy has seen there, within a few years, and with
his eyes wide open, the spirits of Traddles, of Micawber, of Steerforth,
of Mr. Dick, of Clara Peggotty and Daniel, of Uriah Heep--the last
slept one evening on the sofa pillows before the fire, you may
remember--and of Aunt Betsy herself. But in 1852 he could only look at
the outside of the house, and, now and then, when the door was open, get
a glimpse of the stairs down which some one fell and rolled, one
evening, when somebody else said it was Copperfield!
The Boy never walked along the streets of London by his father's side
during that memorable summer without meeting, in fancy, some friend of
David's, without passing some spot that David knew, and loved, or hated.
And he recognized St. Paul's Cathedral at the first glance, because it
had figured as an illustration on the cover of Peggotty's work-box!
Perhaps the event which gave him the greatest pleasure was a casual
meeting with little Miss Moucher in a green omnibus coming from the top
of Baker Street to Trafalgar Square. It could not possibly have been
anybody else. There were the same large head and face, the same short
arms. "Throat she had none; waist she had none; legs she had none, worth
mentioning." The Boy can still hear the pattering of the rain on the
rattly windows of that lumbering green omnibus; he can remember every
detail of the impressive drive; and Miss Moucher, and the fact of her
existence in the flesh, and there present, wiped from his mind every
trace of Mme. Tussaud's famous gallery, and the waxworks it contained.
This was the Book of The Boy's Boyhood. He does not recommend it as the
exclusive literature of their boyhood to other boys; but out of it The
Boy knows that he got nothing but what was healthful and helping. It
taught him to abominate selfish brutality and sneaking falsehood, as
they were exhibited in the Murdstones and the Heeps; it taught him to
keep Charles I., and other fads, out of his "Memorials"; it taught him
to avoid rash expenditure as it was practised by the Micawbers; it
showed him that a man like Steerforth might be the best of good fellows
and at the same time the worst and most dangerous of companions; it
showed, on the other hand, that true friends like Traddles are worth
having and worth keeping; it introduced him to the devoted, sisterly
affection of a woman like Agnes; and it proved to him that the rough
pea-jacket of a man like Ham Peggotty might cover the simple heart of
as honest a gentleman as ever lived.
[Illustration: THE BOY'S FATHER]
The Boy, in his time, has been brought in contact with many famous men
and women; but upon nothing in his whole experience does he look back
now with greater satisfaction than upon his slight intercourse with the
first great man he ever knew. Quite a little lad, he was staying at the
Pulaski House in Savannah, in 1853--perhaps it was in 1855--when his
father told him to observe particularly the old gentleman with the
spectacles, who occupied a seat at their table in the public
dining-room; for, he said, the time would come when The Boy would be
very proud to say that he had breakfasted, and dined, and supped with
Mr. Thackeray. He had no idea who, or what, Mr. Thackeray was; but his
father considered him a great man, and that was enough for The Boy. He
did pay particular attention to Mr. Thackeray, with his eyes and his
ears; and one morning Mr. Thackeray paid a little attention to him, of
which he is proud, indeed. Mr. Thackeray took The Boy between his knees,
and asked his name, and what he intended to be when he grew up. He
replied, "A farmer, sir." Why, he cannot imagine, for he never had the
slightest inclination towards a farmer's life. And then Mr. Thackeray
put his gentle hand upon The Boy's little red head, and said: "Whatever
you are, try to be a good one."
To have been blessed by Thackeray is a distinction The Boy would not
exchange for any niche in the Temple of Literary Fame; no laurel crown
he could ever receive would be able to obliterate, or to equal, the
sense of Thackeray's touch; and if there be any virtue in the laying on
of hands The Boy can only hope that a little of it has descended upon
him.
And whatever The Boy is, he has tried, for Thackeray's sake, "to be a
good one!"
FOUR DOGS
WHISKIE
AN EAU DE VIE
In doggerel lines, Whiskie my dog I sing.
These lines are after Virgil, Pope, or some one.
His very voice has got a Whiskie Ring.
I call him Whiskie, 'cause he's such a rum one.
His is a high-whine, and his nip has power,
Hot-Scotch his temper, but no Punch is merrier;
Not Rye, not Schnappish, he's no Whiskie-Sour.
I call him Whiskie--he's a Whis-Skye terrier.
FOUR DOGS
It was Dr. John Brown, of Edinboro', who once spoke in sincere sympathy
of the man who "led a dog-less life." It was Mr. "Josh Billings" who
said that in the whole history of the world there is but one thing that
money cannot buy, to wit: the wag of a dog's tail. And it was Professor
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.
The Boy has been the friend and confidant of Four Dogs who have helped
to humanize him for a quarter of a century and more, and who have souls
to be saved, he is sure. And when he crosses the Stygian River he
expects to find, on the other shore, a trio of dogs wagging their tails
almost off, in their joy at his coming, and with honest tongues hanging
out to lick his hands and his feet. And then he is going, with these
faithful, devoted dogs at his heels, to talk about dogs with Dr. John
Brown, Sir Edwin Landseer, and Mr. "Josh Billings."
The first dog, Whiskie, was an alleged Skye terrier, coming, alas! from
a clouded, not a clear, sky. He had the most beautiful and the most
perfect head ever seen on a dog, but his legs were altogether too long;
and the rest of him, was--just dog. He came into the family in 1867 or
1868. He was, at the beginning, not popular with the seniors; but he was
so honest, so ingenuous, so "square," that he made himself irresistible,
and he soon became even dearer to the father and to the mother than he
was to The Boy. Whiskie was not an amiable character, except to his own
people. He hated everybody else, he barked at everybody else, and
sometimes he bit everybody else--friends of the household as well as the
butcher-boys, the baker-boys, and the borrowers of money who came to the
door. He had no discrimination in his likes and dislikes, and,
naturally, he was not popular, except among his own people. He hated all
cats but his own cat, by whom he was bullied in a most outrageous way.
Whiskie had the sense of shame and the sense of humor.
[Illustration: WHISKIE]
One warm summer evening, the family was sitting on the front steps,
after a refreshing shower of rain, when Whiskie saw a cat in the street,
picking its dainty way among the little puddles of water. With a
muttered curse he dashed after the cat without discovering, until within
a few feet of it, that it was the cat who belonged to him. He tried to
stop himself in his impetuous career, he put on all his brakes,
literally skimming along the street railway-track as if he were out
simply for a slide, passing the cat, who gave him a half-contemptuous,
half-pitying look; and then, after inspecting the sky to see if the rain
was really over and how the wind was, he came back to his place between
the father and The Boy as if it were all a matter of course and of
every-day occurrence. But he knew they were laughing at him; and if ever
a dog felt sheepish, and looked sheepish--if ever a dog said, "What an
idiot I've made of myself!" Whiskie was that dog.
The cat was a martinet in her way, and she demanded all the privileges
of her sex. Whiskie always gave her precedence, and once when he, for a
moment, forgot himself and started to go out of the dining-room door
before her, she deliberately slapped him in the face; whereupon he drew
back instantly, like the gentleman he was, and waited for her to pass.
Whiskie was fourteen or fifteen years of age in 1882, when the mother
went to join the father, and The Boy was taken to Spain by a good aunt
and cousins. Whiskie was left at home to keep house with the two old
servants who had known him all his life, and were in perfect sympathy
with him. He had often been left alone before during the family's
frequent journeyings about the world, the entire establishment being
kept running purely on his account. Usually he did not mind the
solitude; he was well taken care of in their absence, and he felt that
they were coming back some day. This time he knew it was different. He
would not be consoled. He wandered listlessly and uselessly about the
house; into the mother's room, into his master's room; and one morning
he was found in a dark closet, where he had never gone before, dead--of
a broken heart.
He had only a stump of a tail, but he will wag it--when next his master
sees him!
[Illustration: PUNCH]
The second dog was Punch--a perfect, thorough-bred Dandie Dinmont, and
the most intelligent, if not the most affectionate, of the lot. Punch
and The Boy kept house together for a year or two, and alone. The first
thing in the morning, the last thing at night, Punch was in evidence. He
went to the door to see his master safely off; he was sniffing at the
inside of the door the moment the key was heard in the latch, no matter
how late at night; and so long as there was light enough he watched for
his master out of the window. Punch, too, had a cat--a son, or a
grandson, of Whiskie's cat. Punch's favorite seat was in a chair in the
front basement. Here, for hours, he would look out at the
passers-by--indulging in the study of man, the proper study of his
kind. The chair was what is known as "cane-bottomed," and through its
perforations the cat was fond of tickling Punch, as he sat. When Punch
felt that the joke had been carried far enough, he would rise in his
wrath, chase the cat out into the kitchen, around the back-yard, into
the kitchen again, and then, perhaps, have it out with the cat under the
sink--without the loss of a hair, the use of a claw, or an angry spit or
snarl. Punch and the cat slept together, and dined together, in utter
harmony; and the master has often gone up to his own bed, after a
solitary cigar, and left them purring and snoring in each other's arms.
They assisted at each other's toilets, washed each other's faces, and
once, when Mary Cook was asked what was the matter with Punch's eye, she
said: "I _think_, Sur, that the cat must have put her finger in it, when
she combed his bang!"
Punch loved everybody. He seldom barked, he never bit. He cared nothing
for clothes, or style, or social position. He was as cordial to a beggar
as he would have been to a king; and if thieves had come to break
through and steal, Punch, in his unfailing, hospitable amiability, would
have escorted them through the house, and shown them where the treasures
were kept. All the children were fond of Punch, who accepted mauling as
never did dog before. His master could carry him up-stairs by the tail,
without a murmur of anything but satisfaction on Punch's part; and one
favorite performance of theirs was an amateur representation of "Daniel
in the Lion's Den," Punch being all the animals, his master, of course,
being the prophet himself. The struggle for victory was something awful.
Daniel seemed to be torn limb from limb, Punch, all the time, roaring
like a thousand beasts of the forest, and treating his victim as
tenderly as if he were wooing a sucking dove. The entertainment--when
there were young persons at the house--was of nightly occurrence, and
always repeatedly encored. Punch, however, never cared to play Lion to
the Daniel of anybody else.
One of Punch's expressions of poetic affection is still preserved by a
little girl who is now grown up, and has little girls of her own. It was
attached to a Christmas-gift--a locket containing a scrap of blue-gray
wool. And here it is:
"Punch Hutton is ready to vow and declare
That his friend Milly Barrett's a brick.
He begs she'll accept of this lock of his hair;
And he sends her his love--and a lick."
Punch's most memorable performance, perhaps, was his appearance at a
dinner-party of little ladies and gentlemen. They were told that the
chief dish of the entertainment was one which they all particularly
liked, and their curiosity, naturally, was greatly excited. The table
was cleared, the carving-knife was sharpened in a most demonstrative
manner, and half a dozen pairs of very wide-open little eyes were fixed
upon the door through which the waitress entered, bearing aloft an
enormous platter, upon which nothing was visible but a cover of equally
enormous size--both of them borrowed, by-the-way, for the important
occasion. When the cover was raised, with all ceremony, Punch was
discovered, in a highly nervous state, and apparently as much delighted
and amused at the situation as was anybody else. The guests, with one
voice, declared that he was "sweet enough to eat."
Punch died very suddenly; poisoned, it is supposed, by somebody whom he
never injured. He never injured a living soul! And when Mary Cook dug a
hole, by the side of Whiskie's grave, one raw afternoon, and put Punch
into it, his master is not ashamed to confess that he shut himself up in
his room, threw himself onto the bed, and cried as he has not cried
since they took his mother away from him.
Mop was the third of the quartet of dogs, and he came into the household
like the Quality of Mercy. A night or two after the death of Punch, his
master chanced to be dining with the Coverleys, in Brooklyn. Mr.
Coverley, noticing the trappings and the suits of woe which his friend
wore in his face, naturally asked the cause. He had in his stable a
Dandie as fine as Punch, whom he had not seen, or thought of, for a
month. Would the bereaved one like to see him? The mourner would like to
look at any dog who looked like the companion who had been taken from
him; and a call, through a speaking-tube, brought into the room, head
over heels, with all the wild impetuosity of his race, Punch
personified, his ghost embodied, his twin brother. The same long, lithe
body, the same short legs (the fore legs shaped like a capital S), the
same short tail, the same hair dragging the ground, the same beautiful
head, the same wistful, expressive eye, the same cool, insinuating nose.
The new-comer raced around the table, passing his owner unnoticed, and
not a word was spoken. Then this Dandie cut a sort of double
pigeon-wing, gave a short bark, put his crooked, dirty little feet on
the stranger's knees, insinuated his cool and expressive nose into an
unresisting hand, and wagged his stump of a tail with all his loving
might. It was the longed-for touch of a vanished paw, the lick of a
tongue that was still. He was unkempt, uncombed, uncared for, but he was
another Punch, and he knew a friend when he saw one. "If that were my
dog he would not live forgotten in a stable: he would take the place in
the society to which his birth and his evident breeding entitle him,"
was the friend's remark, and Mop regretfully went back to his stall.
[Illustration: MOP AND HIS MASTER]
The next morning, early, he came into the Thirty-fourth Street study,
combed, kempt, shining, cared for to a superlative degree; with a note
in his mouth signifying that his name was Mop and that he was The Boy's.
He was The Boy's, and The Boy was his, so long as he lived, ten happy
years for both of them.
Without Punch's phenomenal intelligence, Mop had many of Punch's ways,
and all of Punch's trust and affection; and, like Punch, he was never so
superlatively happy as when he was roughly mauled and pulled about by
his tail. When by chance he was shut out in the back-yard, he knocked,
with his tail, on the door; he squirmed his way into the heart of Mary
Cook in the first ten minutes, and in half an hour he was on terms of
the most affectionate friendship with Punch's cat.
Mop had absolutely no sense of fear or of animal proportions. As a
catter he was never equalled; a Yale-man, by virtue of an honorary
degree, he tackled everything he ever met in the feline way--with the
exception of the Princeton Tiger--and he has been known to attack dogs
seven times as big as himself. He learned nothing by experience: he
never knew when he was thrashed. The butcher's dog at Onteora whipped,
and bit, and chewed him into semi-helpless unconsciousness three times a
week for four months, one summer; and yet Mop, half paralyzed, bandaged,
soaked in Pond's Extract, unable to hold up his head to respond to the
greetings of his own family, speechless for hours, was up and about and
ready for another fray and another chewing, the moment the butcher's
dog, unseen, unscented by the rest of the household, appeared over the
brow of the hill.
The only creature by whom Mop was ever really overcome was a
black-and-white, common, every-day, garden skunk. He treed this
unexpected visitor on the wood-pile one famous moonlight night in
Onteora. And he acknowledged his defeat at once, and like a man. He
realized fully his own unsavory condition. He retired to a far corner of
the small estate, and for a week, prompted only by his own instinct, he
kept to the leeward of Onteora society.
He went out of Onteora, that summer, in a blaze of pugnacious glory. It
was the last day of the season; many households were being broken up,
and four or five families were leaving the colony together. All was
confusion and hurry at the little railway station at Tannersville.
Scores of trunks were being checked, scores of packages were being
labelled for expressage, every hand held a bag, or a bundle, or both;
and Mop, a semi-invalid, his fore paw and his ear in slings, the result
of recent encounters with the butcher's dog, was carried, for safety's
sake, and for the sake of his own comfort, in a basket, which served as
an ambulance, and was carefully placed in the lap of the cook. As the
train finally started, already ten minutes late, the cook, to give her
hero a last look at the Hill-of-the-Sky, opened the basket, and the
window, that he might wag a farewell tail. When lo! the butcher's dog
appeared upon the scene, and, in an instant, Mop was out of the window
and under the car-wheels, in the grip of the butcher's dog. Intense was
the excitement. The engine was stopped, and brakemen, and firemen, and
conductors, and passengers, and on-lookers, and other dogs, were
shouting and barking and trying to separate the combatants. At the end
of a second ten minutes Mop--minus a piece of the other ear--was back in
his ambulance: conquered, but happy. He never saw the butcher's dog or
Onteora again.
To go back a little. Mop was the first person who was told of his
master's engagement, and he was the first to greet the wife when she
came home, a bride, to his own house. He had been made to understand,
from the beginning, that she did not care for dogs--in general. And he
set himself out to please, and to overcome the unspoken antagonism. He
had a delicate part to play, and he played it with a delicacy and a tact
which rarely have been equalled. He did not assert himself; he kept
himself in the background; he said little; his approaches at first were
slight and almost imperceptible, but he was always ready to do, or to
help, in an unaggressive way. He followed her about the house, up-stairs
and down-stairs, and he looked and waited. Then he began to sit on the
train of her gown; to stand as close to her as was fit and proper; once
in a while to jump upon the sofa beside her, or into the easy-chair
behind her, winking at his master, from time to time, in his quiet way.
And at last he was successful. One dreary winter, when he suffered
terribly from inflammatory rheumatism, he found his mistress making a
bed for him by the kitchen fire, getting up in the middle of the night
to go down to look after him, when he uttered, in pain, the cries he
could not help. And when a bottle of very rare old brandy, kept for some
extraordinary occasion of festivity, was missing, the master was
informed that it had been used in rubbing Mop!
Mop's early personal history was never known. Told once that he was the
purest Dandie in America, and asked his pedigree, his master was moved
to look into the matter of his family tree. It seems that a certain
sea-captain was commissioned to bring back to this country the best
Dandie to be had in all Scotland. He sent his quartermaster to find him,
and the quartermaster found Mop under a private carriage, in Argyle
Street, Glasgow, and brought him on board. That is Mop's pedigree.
Mop died of old age and of a complication of diseases, in the spring of
1892. He lost his hair, he lost his teeth, he lost everything but his
indomitable spirit; and when almost on the brink of the grave, he stood
in the back-yard--literally, on the brink of his own grave--for eight
hours in a March snow-storm, motionless, and watching a great black cat
on the fence, whom he hypnotized, and who finally came down to be
killed. The cat weighed more than Mop did, and was very gamy. And the
encounter nearly cost a lawsuit.