Adopting an Abandoned Farm | Page 9

best is an amiable idiot; at its worst, a dangerous

maniac."
CHAPTER IV.
FOR THOSE WHO LOVE PETS.
"All were loved and all were regretted, but life is made up of
forgetting."
"The best thing which a man possesses is his dog."
When I saw a man driving into my yard after this, I would dart out of a
back door and flee to sweet communion with my cows.
On one such occasion I shouted back that I did not want a horse of any
variety, could not engage any fruit trees, did not want the place
photographed, and was just going out to spend the day. I was
courteously but firmly informed that my latest visitor had, singular to
relate, no horse to dispose of, but he "would like fourteen dollars for
my dog tax for the current year!" As he was also sheriff, constable, and
justice of the peace, I did not think it worth while to argue the question,
although I had no more thought of being called up to pay a dog tax than
a hen tax or cat tax. I trembled, lest I should be obliged to enumerate
my entire menagerie--cats, dogs, canaries, rabbits, pigs, ducks, geese,
hens, turkeys, pigeons, peacocks, cows, and horses.
Each kind deserves an entire chapter, and how easy it would be to write
of cats and their admirers from Cambyses to Warner; of dogs and their
friends from Ulysses to Bismarck. I agree with Ik Marvel that a cat is
like a politician, sly and diplomatic; purring--for food; and
affectionate--for a consideration; really caring nothing for friendship
and devotion, except as means to an end. Those who write books and
articles and verse and prose tributes to cats think very differently, but
the cats I have met have been of this type.
And dogs. Are they really so affectionate, or are they also a little
shrewd in licking the hand that feeds them? I dislike to be pessimistic.
But when my dogs come bounding to meet me for a jolly morning

greeting they do seem expectant and hungry rather than affectionate. At
other hours of the day they plead with loving eyes and wagging tails for
a walk or a seat in the carriage or permission to follow the wagon.
But I will not analyze their motives. They fill the house and grounds
with life and frolic, and a farm would be incomplete if they were
missing. Hamerton, in speaking of the one dog, the special pet and dear
companion of one's youth, 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 three-score and ten, man and dog might
have traveled through life together, but, as it is, we must either have a
succession of affections, or else, when the first is buried in its early
grave, live in a chill condition of dog-less-ness."
I thank him for that expressive compound word. Almost every one
might, like Grace Greenwood and Gautier, write a History of my Pets
and make a readable book. Carlyle, the grand old growler, was actually
attached to a little white dog--his wife's special delight, for whom she
used to write cute little notes to the master. And when he met with a
fatal accident, he was tenderly nursed by both for months, and when the
doctor was at last obliged to put him out of pain by prussic acid, their
grief was sincere. They buried him at the top of the garden in Cheyne
Row, and planted cowslips round his grave, and his 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, of fidelity, girdled by the darkness of night eternal."
Beecher said many a good thing about dogs, but I like this best:
Speaking of horseback riding, he incidentally remarked that in
evolution, the human door was just shut upon the horse, but the dog got
fully up before the door was shut. If there was not reason, mirthfulness,
love, honor, and fidelity in a dog, he did not know where to look for it.

Oh, if they only could speak, what wise and humorous and sarcastic
things they would say! Did you never feel snubbed by an immense dog
you had tried to patronize? And I have seen many a dog smile. Bayard