He was always called Daisy. We hated the name, but the christening
"just happened" with the suddenness of influenza or an earthquake.
Percy was the culprit, for he knocked all our pre-arranged plans for
a name on the head by his passion for what he calls "apt quotation."
When he (Daisy) emerged from his basket we saw that, like NELSON,
he was blind of an eye. Percy, immediately inspired, quoted from
WORDSWORTH'S _Ode to the Daisy_, "A little Cyclops with one eye"--and
the result was inevitable. Daisy resented the name from the first, for
at the very font, so to speak, he drew blood from us both, and then,
utterly indifferent to our feelings, settled himself on the top of an
empty beer barrel and there performed his evening ablutions.
It was a curious coincidence that made him select a beer barrel, for
thereby hung a tragic tale. He and his twin-brother had been adopted
from infancy by the Sergeants' Mess and had lived in peace and
plenty--in fact in too much plenty, for I regret to say that Daisy's
brother died of drink from having formed the discreditable habit
of emptying all the dregs of the Sergeants' beer mugs into his own
inside. However, he was granted military obsequies, which were so
successfully performed that an account of them found its way into one
of the daily papers. This so delighted the amateur undertakers that
Daisy's brother was at once exhumed and re-buried with further pomp
and circumstance. Daisy meanwhile, feeling himself of less consequence
than the departed hero, began to mope; so to save life and reason he
was sent to us "to cheer and cherish," as the Sergeants put it.
An egotistical irascible bachelor seagull; yet his vices, and he was
made up of them, became virtues in our eyes.
The morning after his arrival he went for a solemn tour of
investigation, finally taking up his abode in the middle of the
tennis-court, as being to his mind the most salubrious spot--and from
there he ruled despotically. "That blooming bird fears neither man nor
devil," Cook was heard to mutter, after he had embedded his beak in
her ankle; and it was quite true. He so terrified Horatio, our portly
bull-dog, by pecking at his sensitive kinky tail from behind when he
was absent-mindedly lapping water from Daisy's bath, that he never
again ventured alone on to the lawn. I say "alone," for he dared once
more, emboldened by the presence of his unwilling young wife, who
accompanied him, tied by a rope to his collar.
Percy and I watched them advance from afar and waited in suspense
for the sequel. Daisy was taking a post-prandial nap inside his beer
barrel. There was a breathless hush, followed by a pandemonium of
sound, masculine and feminine cries of distress mingled with raucous
shrieks of anger, and then we saw our valiant couple in slow but
ignominious retreat. Horatio was dragging his spouse along on her
back, with legs in air and bulging eyes! What had happened in the
interim we never knew, but both Mr. and Mrs. Horatio bore marks of
battle, and they were sadder and wiser dogs for many days to come.
Percy, always deprecatingly anxious to find favour in Daisy's eyes,
tore down to the shore one morning before breakfast and returned with
a large pailful of salt water, which he laid--so to speak--at Daisy's
feet. Daisy glanced at it and at Percy with his cold grey eye, and
then stepped lightly into his fresh-water tub, which was always at
hand. Percy however, being of an unsnubbable disposition, tried again
to find a way into Daisy's heart, and this time he brought Hengist
and Horsa, two young seagulls that he had found derelict on the rocks,
hoping that he would take a paternal interest in their loneliness;
but, like his great prototype, Daisy clapped his glass to his
sightless eye, and "I'm damned if I see them," he said. But he saw
them all right at meal times, when he would whisk round suddenly as
their portion of fish was flung to them, and swiftly gobble it up!
So Daisy prospered and grew sleek and fat, and his days were long in
the land. He consented indeed to partake of our hospitality for over
a year, won many hearts, but kept his own intact, until the following
spring, when a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love;
then be preened his white waistcoat and sallied forth.
***
Did I say he was a bachelor? The last we beard of him was from a
fisherman friend who, when in search of sea-birds' eggs, saw and
recognised our Daisy by the fierceness of his one eye. He was
reluctantly taking his turn on the family egg while Mrs. Daisy
stretched and titivated herself after her domestic labours.
Does he sometimes, we wonder, think regretfully of his celibate days
and the beer barrel, where he lived _en garçon?_
* * * * *
"Widower, 35, abstainer, would like to correspond with
respectable widow, or otherwise, view matrimony."--_Provincial
Paper_.
He seems an easy-going fellow who would make any woman happy.
* * * * *