Evergreens | Page 7

we restrained ourselves, and sat on.
We sat on for over an hour, by which time, having both grown careless
of life and indifferent to the voice of Wisdom, we did "chance it;" and
throwing the table-cloth over our would-be murderer, charged for the
door and got out.
The next morning we complained to our landlady of her carelessness in
leaving wild beasts about the place, and we gave her a brief if not
exactly truthful, history of the business.
Instead of the tender womanly sympathy we had expected, the old lady
sat down in the easy chair and burst out laughing.
"What! old Boozer," she exclaimed, "you was afraid of old Boozer!
Why, bless you, he wouldn't hurt a worm! He ain't got a tooth in his
head, he ain't; we has to feed him with a spoon; and I'm sure the way
the cat chivies him about must be enough to make his life a burden to
him. I expect he wanted you to nurse him; he's used to being nursed."
And that was the brute that had kept us sitting on a table, with our boots
off, for over an hour on a chilly night!
Another bull-dog exhibition that occurs to me was one given by my
uncle. He had had a bulldog--a young one--given to him by a friend. It
was a grand dog, so his friend had told him; all it wanted was
training--it had not been properly trained. My uncle did not profess to

know much about the training of bull-dogs; but it seemed a simple
enough matter, so he thanked the man, and took his prize home at the
end of a rope.
"Have we got to live in the house with _this?_" asked my aunt,
indignantly, coming in to the room about an hour after the dog's advent,
followed by the quadruped himself, wearing an idiotically self-satisfied
air.
"That!" exclaimed my uncle, in astonishment; "why, it's a splendid dog.
His father was honorably mentioned only last year at the Aquarium."
"Ah, well, all I can say is, that his son isn't going the way to get
honorably mentioned in this neighborhood," replied my aunt, with
bitterness; "he's just finished killing poor Mrs. McSlanger's cat, if you
want to know what he has been doing. And a pretty row there'll be
about it, too!"
"Can't we hush it up?" said my uncle.
"Hush it up?" retorted my aunt. "If you'd heard the row, you wouldn't
sit there and talk like a fool. And if you'll take my advice," added my
aunt, "you'll set to work on this 'training,' or whatever it is, that has got
to be done to the dog, before any human life is lost."
My uncle was too busy to devote any time to the dog for the next day
or so, and all that could be done was to keep the animal carefully
confined to the house.
And a nice time we had with him! It was not that the animal was
bad-hearted. He meant well--he tried to do his duty. What was wrong
with him was that he was too hard-working. He wanted to do too much.
He started with an exaggerated and totally erroneous notion of his
duties and responsibilities. His idea was that he had been brought into
the house for the purpose of preventing any living human soul from
coming near it and of preventing any person who might by chance have
managed to slip in from ever again leaving it.
We endeavored to induce him to take a less exalted view of his position,
but in vain. That was the conception he had formed in his own mind
concerning his earthly task, and that conception he insisted on living up
to with, what appeared to us to be, unnecessary conscientiousness.
He so effectually frightened away all the trades people, that they at last
refused to enter the gate. All that they would do was to bring their
goods and drop them over the fence into the front garden, from where

we had to go and fetch them as we wanted them.
"I wish you'd run into the garden," my aunt would say to me--I was
stopping with them at the time--"and see if you can find any sugar; I
think there's some under the big rose-bush. If not, you'd better go to
Jones' and order some."
And on the cook's inquiring what she should get ready for lunch, my
aunt would say:
"Well, I'm sure, Jane, I hardly know. What have we? Are there any
chops in the garden, or was it a bit of steak that I noticed on the lawn?"
On the second afternoon the plumbers came to do a little job to the
kitchen boiler. The dog, being engaged at the time in