by your own brother--let alone standing by a cat."
"What's the matter with you?" retorted Jim. "You was the one who
proposed boycotting Monty, and now you're talking as if he was a tin
saint on wheels."
"Monty's acted like a man in this business," replied Simpson, "and it's
my opinion that we've all treated him pretty particular mean. If we pull
through this scrimmage Monty's my friend, and don't you forget it."
Monte Carlo lost none of his habitual caution, although he was engaged
in what he knew to be a desperate and nearly hopeless enterprise. On
leaving the saloon he threw himself flat on the ground, and slowly drew
himself along until he reached the shelter of the high grass. Then
rising to his hands and knees he crept rapidly and steadily in the
direction of his cabin.
His course soon brought him between the fire of the miners and that of
the Indians, but as neither could see him he fancied he was safe for the
moment. He was drawing steadily closer to his goal, and was already
beginning to feel the thrill of success, when a sharp blow on the right
knee brought him headlong to the ground. A stray shot, fired possibly by
some nervous miner who had taken his place at the saloon window, had
struck him and smashed his leg.
He could no longer creep on his hands and knees, but with indomitable
resolution he dragged himself onward by clutching at the strong roots of
the grass. His disabled leg gave him exquisite pain as it trailed behind
him, and he knew that the wound was bleeding freely; but he still hoped
to reach his cabin before faintness or death should put a stop to his
progress. He felt sure that the shot which had struck him had not been
aimed at him by an Indian, for if it had been he would already have felt
the scalping knife. The nearer he drew to his cabin the less danger
there was that the Indians would perceive him. If he could only endure
the pain and the hemorrhage a few minutes longer he could reach and push
open the door of his cabin, and give his imprisoned friend a chance for
life. He dragged himself on with unfaltering resolution, and with his
silent lips closed tightly. Not a groan nor a curse nor a prayer escaped
him. He stuck to his task with the grim fortitude of the wolf who gnaws
his leg free from the trap. All his thoughts and all his fast-vanishing
strength were concentrated on the effort to save the creature that had
loved him.
After an eternity of anguish he reached the open space in front of the
cabin, where the thick smoke hid him completely from the sight of both
friends and foes. The flames had just caught the roof, and the heat was
so intense that for an instant it made him forget the pain of his wound,
as his choked lungs gasped for air. The wail of the frightened animal
within the cabin gave him new energy. Digging his fingers into the
ground he dragged himself across the few yards that separated him from
the door. He reached it at last, pushed it open, and with a smile on his
face lost consciousness as the cat bounded out and fled like a mad
creature into the grass.
Two hours later a troop of Mounted Police, who had illegally and
generously crossed the border in time to drive off the Indians and to
rescue the few surviving members of the camp, found, close to the
smouldering embers of Monty's cabin, a scorched and blackened corpse, by
the side of which sat a bristling black cat. The animal ceased to lick
the maimed features of the dead man, and turned fiercely on the
approaching troopers. When one of them dismounted and attempted to touch
the corpse the cat flew at him with such fury that he hurriedly
remounted his horse, amid the jeers of his comrades. The cat resumed the
effort to recall the dead man to life with its rough caresses, and the
men sat silently in their saddles watching the strange sight.
"We can't bury the man without first shooting the cat," said one of the
troopers.
"Then we'll let him lie," said the sergeant in command. "We can stop
here on our way back from the Fort, and maybe by that time the cat'll
listen to reason. I'd as soon shoot my best friend as shoot the poor
beast now."
And the troop passed on, leaving Tom alone in the wilderness with his
silent friend.
WILLIAM LIVINGSTON ALDEN.
THE QUEEN'S CAT
Once there was a great and powerful King who was as good as gold and as
brave as a lion, but he had one weakness, which was a horror of cats. If
he saw one through an open window he shuddered so that his medals
jangled together and his crown fell off; if any one mentioned a cat at
the table he instantly spilled his soup all down the front of his
ermine; and if by any chance a cat happened to stroll into the audience
chamber, he immediately jumped on to his throne, gathering his robes
around him and shrieking at the top of his lungs.
Now this King was a bachelor and his people didn't like it; so being
desirous of pleasing them, he looked around among the neighbouring royal
families and hit upon a very sweet and beautiful princess, whom he asked
in marriage without any delay, for he was a man of action.
Her parents giving their hearty consent, the pair were married at her
father's palace; and after the festivities were over, the King sped home
to see to the preparation of his wife's apartments. In due time she
arrived, bringing with her a cat. When he saw her mounting the steps
with the animal under her arm, the King, who was at the door to meet
her, uttering a horrid yell, fell in a swoon and had to be revived with
spirits of ammonia. The courtiers hastened to inform the Queen of her
husband's failing, and when he came to, he found her in tears.
"I cannot exist without a cat!" she wept.
"And I, my love," replied the King, "cannot exist with one!"
"You must learn to bear it!" said she.
"You must learn to live without it!" said he.
"But life would not be worth living without a cat!" she wailed.
"Well, well, my love, we will see what we can do," sighed the King.
"Suppose," he went on, "you kept it in the round tower over there. Then
you could go to see it."
"Shut up my cat that has been used to running around in the open air?"
cried the Queen. "Never!"
"Suppose," suggested the King again, "we made an enclosure for it of
wire netting."
"My dear," cried the Queen, "a good strong cat like mine could climb out
in a minute."
"Well," said the King once more, "suppose we give it the palace roof,
and I will keep out of the way."
"That is a good scheme," said his wife, drying her eyes.
And they immediately fitted up the roof with a cushioned shelter, and a
bed of catnip, and a bench where the Queen might sit. There the cat was
left; and the Queen went up three times a day to feed it, and twice as
many times to visit it, and for almost two days that seemed the solution
of the problem. Then the cat discovered that by making a spring to the
limb of an overhanging oak tree, it could climb down the trunk and go
where it liked. This it did, making its appearance in the throne-room,
where the King was giving audience to an important ambassador. Much to
the amazement of the latter, the monarch leapt up screaming, and was
moreover so upset, that the affairs of state had all to be postponed
till the following day. The tree was, of course, cut down; and the next
day the cat found crawling down the gutter to be just as easy, and
jumped in the window while the court was at breakfast. The King
scrambled on to the breakfast table, skilfully overturning the cream and
the coffee with one foot, while planting the other in the poached eggs,
and wreaking untold havoc among the teacups. Again the affairs of state
were postponed while the gutter was ripped off the roof, to the fury of
the head gardener, who had just planted his spring seeds in the beds
around the palace walls. Of course the next rain washed them all away.
This sort of thing continued. The wistaria vine which had covered the
front of the palace for centuries, was ruthlessly torn down, the
trellises along the wings soon followed; and finally an ancient grape
arbour had perforce to be removed as it proved a sure means of descent
for that invincible cat. Even then, he cleverly utilized the balconies
as a ladder to the ground; but by this time the poor King's nerves were
quite shattered and the doctor was called in. All he could prescribe was
a total abstinence from cat; and the Queen, tearfully finding a home for
her pet, composed herself to live without one. The King, well cared for,
soon revived and was himself again, placidly conducting the affairs of
state, and happy in the society of his beloved wife. Not so the latter.
Before long it was noticed that the Queen grew wan, was often heard to
sniff, and seen to wipe her eyes, would not eat, could not sleep,--in
short, the doctor was again called in.
"Dear, dear," he said disconsolately, combing his long beard with his
thin fingers. "This is a difficult situation indeed. There must not be a
cat on the premises, or the King will assuredly have nervous
prostration. Yet the Queen must have a cat or she will pine quite away
with nostalgia."
"I think I had best return to my family," sobbed the poor Queen,
dejectedly. "I bring you nothing but trouble, my own."
"That is impossible, my dearest love," said the King decidedly--"Here my
people have so long desired me to marry, and now that I am at last
settled in the matrimonial way, we must not disappoint them. They enjoy
a Queen so much. It gives them something pretty to think about. Besides,
my love, I am attached to you, myself, and could not possibly manage
without you. No, my dear, there may be a way out of our difficulties,
but that certainly is not it." Having delivered which speech the King
lapsed again into gloom, and the doctor who was an old friend of the
King's went away sadly.
He returned, however, the following day with a smile tangled somewhere
in his long beard. He found the King sitting mournfully by the Queen's
bedside.
"Would your majesty," began the doctor, turning to the Queen, "object
to a cat that did not look like a cat?"
"Oh, no," cried she, earnestly, "just so it's a _cat_!"
"Would your majesty," said the doctor again, turning to the King,
"object to a cat that did not look like a cat?"
"Oh, no," cried he, "just so it doesn't _look_ like a cat!"
"Well," said the doctor, beaming, "I have a cat that is a cat and that
doesn't look any more like a cat than a skillet, and I should be only
too honoured to present it to the Queen if she would be so gracious as
to accept it."
Both the King and the Queen were overjoyed and thanked the doctor with
tears in their eyes. So the cat--for it was a cat though you never would
have known it--arrived and was duly presented to the Queen, who welcomed
it with open arms and felt better immediately.
It was a thin, wiry, long-legged creature, with no tail at all, and
large ears like sails, a face like a lean isosceles triangle with the
nose as a very sharp apex, eyes small and yellow like flat buttons,
brown fur short and coarse, and large floppy feet. It had a voice like a
steam siren and its name was Rosamund.
The King and Queen were both devoted to it; she because it was a cat, he
because it seemed anything but a cat. No one indeed could convince the
King that it was not a beautiful animal, and he had made for it a
handsome collar of gold and amber--"to match," he said, sentimentally,
"its lovely eyes." In sooth so ugly a beast never had such a pampered
and luxurious existence, certainly never so royal a one. Appreciating
its wonderful good fortune, it never showed any inclination to depart;
and the King, the Queen, and Rosamund lived happily ever after.
PEGGY BACON.
CALVIN
Calvin is dead. His life, long to him, but short for the rest of us, was
not marked by startling adventures, but his character was so uncommon
and his qualities were so worthy of imitation, that I have been asked by
those who personally knew him to set down my recollections of his
career.
His origin and ancestry were shrouded in mystery; even his age was a
matter of pure conjecture. Although he was of the Maltese race, I have
reason to suppose that he was American by birth as he certainly was in
sympathy. Calvin was given to me eight years ago by Mrs. Stowe, but she
knew nothing of his age or origin. He walked into her house one day out
of the great unknown and became at once at home, as if he had been
always a friend of the family. He appeared to have artistic and literary
tastes, and it was as if he had inquired at the door if that was the
residence of the author of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, and, upon being assured
that it was, had decided to dwell there. This is, of course, fanciful,
for his antecedents were wholly unknown, but in his time he could hardly
have been in any household where he would not have heard _Uncle Tom's
Cabin_ talked about. When he came to Mrs. Stowe, he was as large as he
ever was, and apparently as old as he ever became. Yet there was in him
no appearance of age; he was in the happy maturity of all his powers,
and you would rather have said in that maturity he had found the secret
of perpetual youth. And it was as difficult to believe that he would
ever be aged as it was to imagine that he had ever been in immature
youth. There was in him a mysterious perpetuity.
After some years, when Mrs. Stowe made her winter home in Florida,
Calvin came to live with us. From the first moment, he fell into the
ways of the house and assumed a recognized position in the family,--I
say recognized, because after he became known he was always inquired for
by visitors, and in the letters to the other members of the family he
always received a message. Although the least obtrusive of beings, his
individuality always made itself felt.
His personal appearance had much to do with this, for he was of royal
mould, and had an air of high breeding. He was large, but he had nothing
of the fat grossness of the celebrated Angora family; though powerful,
he was exquisitely proportioned, and as graceful in every movement as a
young leopard. When he stood up to open a door--he opened all the doors
with old-fashioned latches--he was portentously tall, and when stretched
on the rug before the fire he seemed too long for this world--as indeed
he was. His coat was the finest and softest I have ever seen, a shade of
quiet Maltese; and from his throat downward, underneath, to the white
tips of his feet, he wore the whitest and most delicate ermine; and no
person was ever more fastidiously neat. In his finely formed head you
saw something of his aristocratic character; the ears were small and
cleanly cut, there was a tinge of pink in the nostrils, his face was
handsome, and the expression of his countenance exceedingly
intelligent--I should call it even a sweet expression if the term were
not inconsistent with his look of alertness and sagacity.
It is difficult to convey a just idea of his gaiety in connection with
his dignity and gravity, which his name expressed. As we know nothing of
his family, of course it will be understood that Calvin was his
Christian name. He had times of relaxation into utter playfulness,
delighting in a ball of yarn, catching sportively at stray ribbons when
his mistress was at her toilet, and pursuing his own tail, with
hilarity, for lack of anything better. He could amuse himself by the
hour, and he did not care for children; perhaps something in his past
was present to his memory. He had absolutely no bad habits, and his
disposition was perfect. I never saw him exactly angry, though I have
seen his tail grow to an enormous size when a strange cat appeared upon
his lawn. He disliked cats, evidently regarding them as feline and
treacherous, and he had no association with them. Occasionally there
would be heard a night concert in the shrubbery. Calvin would ask to
have the door opened, and then you would hear a rush and a "pestzt," and
the concert would explode, and Calvin would quietly come in and resume
his seat on the hearth. There was no trace of anger in his manner, but
he wouldn't have any of that about the house. He had the rare virtue of
magnanimity. Although he had fixed notions about his own rights, and
extraordinary persistency in getting them, he never showed temper at a
repulse; he simply and firmly persisted till he had what he wanted. His
diet was one point; his idea was that of the scholars about
dictionaries,--to "get the best." He knew as well as any one what was in
the house, and would refuse beef if turkey was to be had; and if there
were oysters, he would wait over the turkey to see if the oysters would
not be forthcoming. And yet he was not a gross gourmand; he would eat
bread if he saw me eating it, and thought he was not being imposed on.
His habits of feeding, also, were refined; he never used a knife, and he
would put up his hand and draw the fork down to his mouth as gracefully
as a grown person. Unless necessity compelled, he would not eat in the
kitchen, but insisted upon his meals in the dining-room, and would wait
patiently, unless a stranger were present; and then he was sure to
importune the visitor, hoping that the latter was ignorant of the rule
of the house, and would give him something. They used to say that he
preferred as his table-cloth on the floor a certain well-known church
journal; but this was said by an Episcopalian. So far as I know, he had
no religious prejudices, except that he did not like the association
with Romanists. He tolerated the servants, because they belonged to the
house, and would sometimes linger by the kitchen stove; but the moment
visitors came in he arose, opened the door, and marched into the
drawing-room. Yet he enjoyed the company of his equals, and never
withdrew, no matter how many callers--whom he recognized as of his
society--might come into the drawing-room. Calvin was fond of company,
but he wanted to choose it; and I have no doubt that his was an
aristocratic fastidiousness rather than one of faith. It is so with
most people.
The intelligence of Calvin was something phenomenal, in his rank of
life. He established a method of communicating his wants, and even some
of his sentiments; and he could help himself in many things. There was a
furnace register in a retired room, where he used to go when he wished
to be alone, that he always opened when he desired more heat; but never
shut it, any more than he shut the door after himself. He could do
almost everything but speak; and you would declare sometimes that you
could see a pathetic longing to do that in his intelligent face. I have
no desire to overdraw his qualities, but if there was one thing in him
more noticeable than another, it was his fondness for nature. He could
content himself for hours at a low window, looking into the ravine and
at the great trees, noting the smallest stir there; he delighted, above
all things, to accompany me walking about the garden, hearing the birds,
getting the smell of the fresh earth, and rejoicing in the sunshine. He
followed me and gambolled like a dog, rolling over on the turf and
exhibiting his delight in a hundred ways. If I worked, he sat and
watched me, or looked off over the bank, and kept his ear open to the
twitter in the cherry-trees. When it stormed, he was sure to sit at the
window, keenly watching the rain or the snow, glancing up and down at
its falling; and a winter tempest always delighted him. I think he was
genuinely fond of birds, but, so far as I know, he usually confined
himself to one a day; he never killed, as some sportsmen do, for the
sake of killing, but only as civilized people do,--from necessity. He
was intimate with the flying-squirrels who dwell in the
chestnut-trees,--too intimate, for almost every day in the summer he
would bring in one, until he nearly discouraged them. He was, indeed, a
superb hunter, and would have been a devastating one, if his bump of
destructiveness had not been offset by a bump of moderation. There was
very little of the brutality of the lower animals about him; I don't
think he enjoyed rats for themselves, but he knew his business, and for
the first few months of his residence with us he waged an awful campaign
against the horde, and after that his simple presence was sufficient to
deter them from coming on the premises. Mice amused him, but he usually
considered them too small game to be taken seriously; I have seen him
play for an hour with a mouse, and then let him go with a royal
condescension. In this whole matter of "getting a living," Calvin was a
great contrast to the rapacity of the age in which he lived.
I hesitate a little to speak of his capacity for friendship and the
affectionateness of his nature, for I know from his own reserve that he
would not care to have it much talked about. We understood each other
perfectly, but we never made any fuss about it; when I spoke his name
and snapped my fingers, he came to me; when I returned home at night, he
was pretty sure to be waiting for me near the gate, and would rise and
saunter along the walk, as if his being there were purely
accidental,--so shy was he commonly of showing feeling; and when I
opened the door he never rushed in, like a cat, but loitered, and
lounged, as if he had had no intention of going in, but would condescend
to. And yet, the fact was, he knew dinner was ready, and he was bound
to be there. He kept the run of dinner-time. It happened sometimes,
during our absence in the summer, that dinner would be early, and Calvin
walking about the grounds, missed it and came in late. But he never made
a mistake the second day. There was one thing he never did,--he never
rushed through an open doorway. He never forgot his dignity. If he had
asked to have the door opened, and was eager to go out, he always went
deliberately; I can see him now, standing on the sill, looking about at
the sky as if he was thinking whether it were worth while to take an
umbrella, until he was near having his tail shut in.
His friendship was rather constant than demonstrative. When we returned
from an absence of nearly two years, Calvin welcomed us with evident
pleasure, but showed his satisfaction rather by tranquil happiness than
by fuming about. He had the faculty of making us glad to get home. It
was his constancy that was so attractive. He liked companionship, but he
wouldn't be petted, or fussed over, or sit in any one's lap a moment; he
always extricated himself from such familiarity with dignity and with no
show of temper. If there was any petting to be done, however, he chose
to do it. Often he would sit looking at me, and then, moved by a
delicate affection, come and pull at my coat and sleeve until he could
touch my face with his nose, and then go away contented. He had a habit
of coming to my study in the morning, sitting quietly by my side or on
the table for hours, watching the pen run over the paper, occasionally
swinging his tail round for a blotter, and then going to sleep among
the papers by the inkstand. Or, more rarely, he would watch the writing
from a perch on my shoulder. Writing always interested him, and, until
he understood it, he wanted to hold the pen.
He always held himself in a kind of reserve with his friend, as if he
had said, "Let us respect our personality, and not make a 'mess' of
friendship." He saw, with Emerson, the risk of degrading it to trivial
conveniency. "Why insist on rash personal relations with your friend?"
"Leave this touching and clawing." Yet I would not give an unfair notion
of his aloofness, his fine sense of the sacredness of the me and the
not-me. And, at the risk of not being believed, I will relate an
incident, which was often repeated. Calvin had the practice of passing a
portion of the night in the contemplation of its beauties, and would
come into our chamber over the roof of the conservatory through the open
window, summer and winter, and go to sleep on the foot of my bed. He
would do this always exactly in this way; he never was content to stay
in the chamber if we compelled him to go upstairs and through the door.
He had the obstinacy of General Grant. But this is by the way. In the
morning, he performed his toilet and went down to breakfast with the
rest of the family. Now, when the mistress was absent from home, and at
no other time, Calvin would come in the morning, when the bell rang, to
the head of the bed, put up his feet and look into my face, follow me
about when I rose, "assist" at the dressing, and in many purring ways
show his fondness, as if he had plainly said, "I know that she has gone
away, but I am here." Such was Calvin in rare moments.