Concerning Animals and Other Matters | Page 3

Morningside, and was beginning to
surround himself with pets and flowers, as was his wont all his life, and
to get a good connection with the home newspapers and magazines,
when, alas! death stepped in, and he died after a short illness on April
25, 1909.
He was interested in the home birds and beasts as he had been with
those in India, and the last time the writer met him he was taking home
some gold-fish for his aquarium. A few days before his death he had
found his way down to the Morningside cemetery, where he had been
enjoying the sunshine and flowers of Spring, and he remarked to his
wife that he would often go there in future to watch the birds building
their nests.
Before that time came, he was himself laid to rest in that very spot in
sure and certain hope of a blessed resurrection.
The above imperfect sketch fails to give the charm and magnetic
attraction of the man, and for this one must go to his works, which for
those who knew him are very illuminating in this respect. In them one

catches a glimpse of his plan for keeping young and cheerful in "the
land of regrets," for one of his charms was his youthfulness and interest
in life. He refused to be depressed by his lonely life. "I am only an
exile," he remarks, "endeavouring to work a successful existence in
Dustypore, and not to let my environment shape me as a pudding takes
the shape of its mould, but to make it tributary to my own happiness."
He therefore urges his readers to cultivate a hobby.
"It is strange," he says, "that Europeans in India know so little, see so
little, care so little, about all the intense life that surrounds them. The
boy who was the most ardent of bug-hunters, or the most enthusiastic
of bird-nesters in England, where one shilling will buy nearly all that is
known, or can be known, about birds or butterflies, maintains in this
country, aided by Messrs. B. &. S., an unequal strife with the
insupportableness of an ennui-smitten life. Why, if he would stir up for
one day the embers of the old flame, he could not quench it again with
such a prairie of fuel around him. I am not speaking of Bombay people,
with their clubs and gymkhanas and other devices for oiling the wheels
of existence, but of the dreary up-country exile, whose life is a blank, a
moral Sahara, a catechism of the Nihilist creed. What such a one needs
is a hobby. Every hobby is good--a sign of good and an influence for
good. Any hobby will draw out the mind, but the one I plead for
touches the soul too, keeps the milk of human kindness from souring,
puts a gentle poetry into the prosiest life. That all my own finer feelings
have not long since withered in this land of separation from 'old
familiar faces,' I attribute partly to a pair of rabbits. All rabbits are
idiotic things, but these come in and sit up meekly and beg a crust of
bread, and even a perennial fare of village moorgee cannot induce me
to issue the order for their execution and conversion into pie. But if
such considerations cannot lead, the struggle for existence should drive
a man in this country to learn the ways of his border tribes. For no one,
I take it, who reflects for an instant will deny that a small mosquito,
with black rings upon a white ground, or a sparrow that has finally
made up its mind to rear a family in your ceiling, exercises an influence
on your personal happiness far beyond the Czar of the Russias. It is not
a question of scientific frontiers--the enemy invades us on all, sides.
We are plundered, insulted, phlebotomised under our own vine and

fig-tree. We might make head against the foe if we laid to heart the
lesson our national history in India teaches--namely, that the way to
fight uncivilised enemies is to encourage them to cut one another's
throats, and then step in and inherit the spoil. But we murder our
friends, exterminate our allies, and then groan under the oppression of
the enemy. I might illustrate this by the case of the meek and
long-suffering musk-rat, by spiders or ants, but these must wait another
day."
Again he says, "The 'poor dumb animals' can give each other a bit of
their minds like their betters, and to me their fierce and tender little
passions, their loves and hates, their envies and jealousies, and their
small vanities beget a sense of fellow-feeling which makes their
presence society. The touch of Nature which makes the whole world
kin is infirmity. A