Chapter III: Part 3

“The monks had a whole penful of genuine St. Bernard puppies, and I bought one. I am ashamed to tell you how much I paid for it. I could hire an army mule to kick me every time I think of the transaction. I took the puppy to the States with me—I was living at New Berlinopolisville, in the State of Iowa, at the time—and brought him up as carefully as if he had been my own son. He grew to be a big, rough-haired dog—one of the biggest I ever saw. And I can’t say that the monks cheated me in respect to his breed. Of course it was all a matter of luck that he didn’t turn out to be a poodle or a black and tan terrier. The fact is that no man or monk knows what one of those pure-blooded St. Bernard pups that are sold at the convent will turn out to be when he gets his growth. He is liable to be anything in the line of dog, from a yellow cur up to a Siberian bloodhound. I once knew a man who bought a St. Bernard pup from one of the very holiest of the entire gang of monks, and that puppy grew up to be a red fox. But you all know of the St. Bernard puppy lottery, and I won’t take up your time commenting on it.

“The monks told me that the puppy would not need the least training. His instinct was so wonderful that the moment he should catch a glimpse of snow on the ground he would rush off to rescue travellers. ‘You just load him up with blankets and things,’ said the monk, ‘and send him out in the snow, and he’ll rescue travellers till you can’t rest.’ The dog was nearly a year old before I had a chance to try his powers, but one November we had a regular blizzard, and when the snow quit falling it was at least two feet deep on a level, not to speak of the drifts.

“After breakfast I tied a whiskey-flask around the dog’s neck and put a blanket on his back, and told him to go out and begin his blessed work of mercy. I was alone in the house at the time, for my wife had gone on a visit to her mother and the cook had got herself arrested for being drunk and disorderly, so there was no one to make any objection to my use of one of my wife’s best blankets. The dog barked with delight when he saw the snow, and rolled in it for a few moments just so as to get the blanket good and wet, and then he started down the street at a gallop. I lived something more than a mile from the village, and there were no houses nearer than half a mile, and as the dog took the road leading away from the village, I did not think that he would stand much chance of picking up any travellers. He didn’t return until noon, and then he didn’t bring anybody home on his back. He did, however, bring six tramps with him, three of whom were pretty drunk, they having drank all the whiskey in the flask. The other three said that the dog had promised them a drink if they would follow him, and they hoped that I would be as good as the dog’s word. As I wasn’t armed, and as the tramps carried big sticks and evidently meant business, I judged it best to sustain the dog’s character for veracity and get rid of them peaceably. They went away after wrestling with a pint of good whiskey, and all the time that idiotic dog was wagging his tail as if he deserved the Humane Society’s medal, instead of deserving a thrashing for trying to rescue tramps when Nature had taken the trouble to furnish a blizzard expressly to thin them out.

“I explained to the dog with my riding-whip the view that he must take of tramps in the future, and then I sent him out again, after filling up his whiskey-flask and giving him another blanket in the place of the one that the tramps had stolen. I told him that in future I should prefer to have him rescue women and children, especially the latter, and that if he found a frozen male traveller he had better confine himself to giving information to the police, instead of lavishing whiskey on possibly undeserving people. He went off, somewhat humbled, but still in excellent spirits, and in a short time rushed up my front steps, dropped something on the door-mat, and rushed off again. At first I thought that the idiot had been rescuing somebody’s linen that had been hung out to dry, but when the linen began to make remarks in a loud voice, I found that it was a particularly lively baby.

“Of course I couldn’t let the little innocent lie and freeze on my doorstep, so I brought it into the house and did my best to quiet it. As I had never had much experience with babies, I found myself in a pretty tight place. I had no milk to give the baby, so I mixed a little flour and water till it looked like milk and got a little of it down the baby’s throat. Then I shook it on my knee till it dropped asleep. I put it in my bed, intending to go out and find some woman who would come and attend to it, when I heard the dog barking, and on opening the front door saw his tail disappearing down the street, and saw that he had left another infant on the door-mat.

“The first baby was a saint in comparison with this one, which was a sort of infantile tramp in appearance and was as noisy as it was dirty. It would not have anything to do with the flour and water, and though I shook it on my knee till I must have loosened all its organs, it refused to go to sleep. So I finally gave it a rubber overshoe to bite on, and put it in a bureau drawer in the spare room and told it to howl its head off if it felt that such was its duty toward mankind. Then I started a second time to search for a woman, and I nearly fell over a third baby on the doorstep. That infernal dog had brought it while I was struggling with the infantile tramp, and he was now off searching for more infants. I wrapped this one up in a blanket and sat down on the doorstep with it, resolved to wait till that dog came back and to lock him up till I could get enough babies off my hands to give me a chance to kill him. I was bound not to miss him, for if I did he would probably keep on till he had brought me all the babies in the county. This baby was the best of the lot, for it slept in my arms without saying a word or expressing the slightest desire to be shaken. In about twenty minutes the dog reappeared with another invoice of babies. This time he brought a brace of twins, as nearly as I could judge, but it was his last exploit that day. I got him by the collar before he could start out again and locked him up in the cellar. The babies I put in a heap in a big clothes-basket that they could not climb out of, and left them to have a crying-match for the championship till I could find a nurse.

“I didn’t have as much trouble in that matter as I had anticipated, for before I could get out of the house some one rang the front-door bell and pounded and yelled as if it was a matter of life and death that the door should be opened instantly. I opened it, and there was a woman who called me every name she could lay her tongue to, and wanted me to give her back her baby instantly. I showed her the babies and told her to take her choice. In fact, I begged her to take away the whole lot, but she said I was worse than a murderer, and after selecting one of the least desirable of the babies, she rushed off with it, promising to send me a policeman immediately. I had never expressed the least desire to see a policeman, but such is female gratitude! I had offered that woman five babies, free, gratis, and for nothing, and instead of being grateful she wanted to get me into trouble.

“I had still four babies on my hands, and as they were now all awake and making all the noise they knew how to make, I put them all in the clothes-basket together, so they could enjoy one another’s society. It wasn’t a bad plan, and I recommend it to any mother with a noisy pair of twins, as it is certain to reduce the noise by one-half. Two of my babies were so occupied with putting their fingers in the other babies’ eyes and in investigating their hair that they had no time to cry. I admit that the two who were undergoing investigation did their best to make a riot, but even then there was only half as much noise as there would have been had the other two joined the concert.

“I thought it so probable that the mother who had visited me was only the first of a procession of mothers, that I gave up the idea of going out to look for a nurse, and stayed at home to receive the mothers politely. It was not long before one presented herself. She was an Irishwoman and the only sensible one of the lot. When she saw that her baby was safe and contented and had a good grip on the hair of a black-eyed baby, she sat down and laughed, and said that she never saw anything so sweet before. According to her account, she lived about a mile from my house, and she was standing at her front door looking at the landscape, when the dog bounded in, caught up the baby out of the cradle, and carried it off. At first she thought the dog was the devil, but presently she remembered that the devil’s time was too much occupied with Irish affairs to permit him to steal babies in Iowa, so she followed the dog as rapidly as she could make her way through the snow. She tracked him by the prints of his paws until she came to my door, and instead of calling me a kidnapper and talking about the police, she was full of pity for me, and volunteered to stay and take care of the whole menagerie until the last of the babies should be called for and taken away.

“The remaining mothers arrived in the course of an hour. I locked myself in the top of the house and left the Irishwoman to explain things. As I afterward learned, the intelligent dog had knocked two women down in the street and stolen their babies out of their arms, and had also broken into two houses, in the last one of which he had bagged his brace of twins. All the mothers, except the Irishwoman, were as unreasonable as they could possibly be. They insisted that I deliberately trained dogs to steal babies, and they had no doubt that my object in stealing them was to vivisect them. As for the dog, they were convinced that he was mad and that their babies would be sure to die of hydrophobia. Two of the women brought their husbands with them, who asked to see me, explaining that they desired to blow my head off. The Irishwoman nobly lied to them, telling them that she had driven me out of the house with a club, and that I was on my way to Chicago and far out of reach. The mothers and their husbands went away at last, and as soon as it was dark I stole out of the back door and took the first train for St. Paul. I didn’t show myself in New Berlinopolisville for the next year.

“What became of the dog? Oh! I forgot to say that the Irishwoman promised to take care of him and to cure him of his passion for babies. I am sorry to say that she did not succeed. She kept him tied up for six weeks, but one day he broke loose and captured a baby out of a baby-wagon in the park. But the baby’s father happened to be with it, and he was one of the best pistol-shots in town, having been a judge of the Montana Supreme Court. He got the drop on the dog before the beast had gone ten feet away with the baby, and though they afterward had to pry the dog’s jaws open in order to get the baby loose, no harm was done to the latter. I settled all the lawsuits without letting them go to trial, although it cost me considerable and I finally judged it best to remove to another State.

“Now, I suppose that some one will be enough of an idiot to repeat this story with variations as a proof of the wonderful intelligence of the St. Bernard dog. If it is intelligence that leads a dog to steal other people’s babies and dump them on a respectable man, I’d like to see what idiocy would do for such a dog. No, sir! depend upon it, the stories about St. Bernard dogs are invented by the monks after stimulating their minds by reading the ‘Lives of the Saints’ and by going trout-fishing. Probably the monks have gradually brought themselves to believe most of the stories. They look like a credulous set of people, and I should rather like to try them with a good American political speech, full of campaign statistics, and see if they could believe it. I shouldn’t be in the least surprised if they could.”

A MATRIMONIAL ROMANCE.

“And by the way,” continued the Colonel, “a curious thing about this Josiah Wilson was that he was married for fifteen years and never had any wife whatever.”

The Colonel had begun a story concerning one Josiah Wilson which promised to be interesting, but his incidental allusion to Mr. Wilson’s matrimonial experience awakened our curiosity, and we begged him to interrupt his narrative long enough to tell us how it came to pass that Josiah was a married man who never had a wife.

“The marriage laws in the United States,” said the Colonel, giving his chair an increased tilt backward, which was his usual way of beginning a fresh anecdote, “are as peculiar in their way as are the divorce laws. You would think to look at them that they would permit anybody to marry anybody else in any way that either of them might choose; but for all that they sometimes make it impossible for a man or a woman to get married. There was a couple who intended to be married in a balloon, which is a style of lunacy that is quite fashionable in some parts of the country, though I can’t see why a man should want to risk his neck in a balloon on his wedding-day, unless it is that it takes so much courage to be married at all that a man forgets all about such minor dangers as are connected with ballooning. The bride, the minister, and two witnesses of assorted sexes went up in the balloon at the appointed time, and, naturally, the bridegroom intended to go with them, but he accidentally caught his foot in a neglected guy-rope and went up head downward about twenty feet below the car. The party in the balloon could not haul him up because they could not get hold of the rope, and the bride would not consent to give up the trip because the groom had always been a little shy, and she was afraid that if she let him go this time she might not be able to land him again. So the parson went on with the ceremony, and the groom made most of his responses in bad language, and howled for help when he wasn’t swearing. When the ceremony was over the aeronaut managed to land the balloon without seriously damaging the bridegroom, but when, a year or two afterward, the bride wanted to get her divorce, the court held that there had never been any marriage, for the reason that both the groom and the bride had not appeared together in the presence of the officiating minister, and that, furthermore, there was no provision in the law which would permit a man to be married upside down.

“But to get back to Josiah Wilson. He lived in Indiana, close to the boundary line between that State and Illinois, and he courted Melinda Smith, a young woman who lived a little way up the mountain-side with her father and three brothers. The girl was anxious to be married, but her family were dead against it. You see, Josiah was a Republican and a Methodist, while the Smiths were Democrats and Baptists, and, naturally, they hated each other like poison; and one night as old man Smith and Josiah met on their way to rival prayer-meetings they exchanged revolver-shots, without, however, doing any harm. Then, once Josiah had most of the calf of his leg taken off by the Smiths’ bull-dog, and twice the Smith boys came into the sitting-room where Josiah was calling on Melinda, and suggested to him with their shot-guns that he had better go home. Gradually Josiah and Melinda came to the conclusion that her family were resolved to discourage the match, so they determined to elope and be married without the knowledge or consent of anybody.

“One dark night Josiah carried a ladder and planted it under Melinda’s window. He had advised her to walk out of the front door, which was always left unlocked at night, but she refused, saying that if she was going to elope she should do it in the proper way, and that if Josiah had no respect for her she had some little respect for herself. She climbed down the ladder with a good deal of difficulty, because she insisted that Josiah should help her, and also that he should stand forty yards away, for reasons connected with her ankles, and he found it rather trying to follow out these contradictory orders. However, Melinda reached the ground at last, and the pair started in a carriage that had been waiting just around a bend in the road, in company with the Methodist minister. Their plan was to drive to the next town and there to be married, but it happened that one of the Smith boys, being restless, got up in the night, and, looking out of the window, saw the ladder standing at Melinda’s window. In about twenty minutes after the young people had started, the whole Smith family and their shot-guns were following the runaways in a wagon and gaining on them fast.

“The Methodist minister, whose hearing was unusually good, heard the sound of hoofs before Josiah noticed it, and told the young people that there was not the least doubt that they were pursued, and would be overtaken in a very few minutes. ‘And then, you know,’ he added, ‘the chances are that, being Baptists, they will shoot first and ask for explanations afterward. The only thing for us to do is to get the marriage ceremony over before they come up. Then they will see that opposition is of no use and will listen to reason.’

“Josiah and Melinda at once consented, and the parson, noticing a little clearing in the woods on the left-hand side of the road and a flat sort of tombstone standing in the middle of it, said that he would stand on that stone and marry his young friends so quick that it would make their hair curl. He was particularly glad to meet with a handy tombstone, for he said that a tombstone was the next thing to a church, and that to be married by the side of a tomb would be almost as solemn as to be married in a minister’s study. So the party hastily descended, the parson mounted the stone, Josiah and Melinda joined hands in front of him, and they were married and the parson had kissed the bride and pocketed his fee just as the Smiths’ wagon drove up and the Smith boys cocked their guns and covered the party. But the parson was wide awake. He had his revolver out and old man Smith covered before anybody had taken aim at him, but instead of shooting he remarked that he was a minister of the blessed gospel of peace, that there was no necessity for bloodshed, and that he would blow a hole through old Smith unless the Smith boys lowered their weapons and consented to argue the matter. ‘The fact is, Colonel Smith,’ said the parson, ‘you’re too late. The young people are legally married, and the sooner you accept the situation the better. I married them not two minutes ago, standing on that identical tombstone.’

“Colonel Smith was a lawyer, and the sharpest one in that part of the country. He saw the force of the minister’s remarks, so he told the boys to put up their guns and he shook hands with the minister. Then he inquired, in a careless sort of way, where Josiah and Melinda had stood while they were being married. The parson showed the footprints of the bride and groom, and then Colonel Smith turned to Melinda and said, ‘You’ll come straight home with me. There hasn’t been any marriage yet. That stone is the boundary mark between Indiana and Illinois, and you were standing in Indiana and that other idiot was standing in Illinois when the parson tried to marry you. Nobody can marry in two States at the same time, and I shan’t recognize the pretended marriage till a court of law compels me to do so, which will be never. I hope this will teach you the folly of fooling with Methodism. When you want to get married next time try a Baptist minister, who will know the difference between a tombstone and a boundary mark.’ There were too many Smiths and they were too well armed to be reasoned with successfully, so the upshot was that Melinda went home with her family and Josiah and the parson went to see a lawyer.

“The next day Josiah brought a suit for divorce against Melinda. It was a friendly suit, you understand, and his only object was to test the question of the validity of his marriage, for, of course, no man can get a divorce unless he first proves that he is married. Old man Smith conducted the case on his side, and a lawyer named Starkweather, who is now a member of the Illinois Legislature, appeared for Josiah Wilson. Colonel Smith argued that while the parson who conducted the alleged marriage ceremony could undoubtedly have married a couple in the State of Indiana, he could not marry a woman in Indiana to a man in Illinois, for the reason that the man and the woman could not be in the same place while they were in two different commonwealths, and that hence Josiah and Melinda had not legally appeared together before the officiating minister. Furthermore, he argued that the minister at the time of the pretended marriage was standing neither in Indiana nor in Illinois, but on the boundary line; that the statute defined the boundary line as ‘an imaginary line’ running from such and such a point to such and such a point, and that a minister who stands in a purely imaginary locality stands virtually nowhere, and hence cannot perform any function of his calling.

“On the other hand, Josiah’s lawyer claimed that the minister had married Melinda Smith in the State of Indiana; that consequently she must have been married to somebody, and that that somebody was unquestionably Josiah Wilson. As to the point that the minister stood in an imaginary locality because, as was alleged, he stood on the boundary line, the lawyer maintained that it was a physical impossibility that a minister weighing two hundred and fifty pounds could stand in a purely imaginative place. Moreover, he was prepared to prove that while performing the ceremony at least one of the minister’s feet was in the State of Indiana, which was sufficient to make him legally present in that State.

“The arguments lasted three days, and the court before which it was tried, consisting of three judges, took all the third day to deliver its verdict. It decided that Melinda Smith was legally married to some person unknown, though not to Josiah Wilson, and that Josiah Wilson was also married to some unknown woman, who was not Melinda Smith, whoever else she might be; that no marriage between the plaintiff and the defendant had ever taken place; and that no divorce could be granted, but that if either of them married any one else he or she would be guilty of bigamy.

“The Smiths, with the exception of Melinda, were delighted with the decision, for it made it reasonably certain that Josiah could never be recognized as her husband. She was a good deal cast down about it, for, like every other Indiana girl, she had looked forward to being married and divorced as the natural lot of woman. Now it appeared that she was married, but in such an unsatisfactory way that she could never have a husband and never be divorced from any one. As for Josiah, he was furious, but there was no help for it; the law was against him, and, as a law-abiding man, he was obliged to respect it, especially as he could not hope to kill off all four of the Smiths if he decided to make a family feud of it; he himself having no family whatever, and no one to help him to keep up his end of the feud.

“For the next fifteen years Josiah lived a single man except in name, and Melinda mourned her hard fate and kept house for her father and brothers; but one day Josiah’s lawyer, who was by this time in the legislature, came to him and offered to have his marriage to Melinda made legal in all respects for five hundred dollars. The lawyer was so certain that he could do this that he was willing to wait for his pay until after he had gained a verdict, and Josiah, after a little bargaining such as every self-respecting man would have made in his place, consented to the lawyer’s terms. It seems that the lawyer had accidentally discovered that there had been a mistake in the survey of part of the boundary line between Indiana and Illinois, and at the very place where Josiah and Melinda were married. A rectification of this mistake would move the line ten feet west, and so place the spot where the pair stood during their wedding entirely within the State of Indiana. The proper steps to obtain the rectification of the boundary were taken, and it was rectified. Then Melinda in her turn began a suit for divorce against Josiah, and had no difficulty in proving the marriage and in obtaining a decree. Josiah paid the lawyer his five hundred dollars and was overjoyed at being finally able to call his Melinda his own. But he met with a little disappointment. Now that Melinda had obtained her divorce, she thought she might as well live up to it and marry a fresh husband. So she married the Methodist minister, who had just lost his third wife, and lived happily ever afterward.

“It was just after this that Josiah, being perhaps made a little reckless by his disappointment, became involved in the affair that I was going to tell you about when you interrupted me and wanted to hear about his marriage. Matrimony is a mighty curious thing, and you can never tell precisely how it is going to turn out. That is one reason why I was never married but once, though I spent ten years of my life in Chicago, and had friends at the bar who stood ready to obtain divorces for me at any moment and without a dollar of expense.”

HOSKINS’ PETS.

“Yes!” said the Colonel reflectively, “I’ve been almost everywhere in my time except in jail, and I’ve been in a great deal worse places than a first-class American jail with all the modern improvements. The fact is that philanthropic people have gone so far in improving the condition of prisoners that most of our prisons are rather better than most of our hotels. At any rate, they are less expensive and the guests are treated with more respect.

“I never could understand a craze that some people have for prisoners. For instance, in New York and Chicago the young ladies have a society for giving flowers to murderers. Whenever a man is convicted of murder and sentenced to be hanged, the girls begin to heave flowers into his cell till he can’t turn round without upsetting a vase of roses or a big basinful of pansies and getting his feet wet. I once knew a murderer who told me that if anything could reconcile him to being hung it would be in getting rid of the floral tributes that the girls lavished on him. You see, he was one of the leading murderers in that section of country, and consequently he received about a cart-load of flowers every day.

“I had a neighbor when I lived in New Berlinopolisville who was President of the Society for Ameliorating the Condition of Prisoners, and he was the craziest man on the subject that I ever met. His name was Hoskins—Colonel Uriah Hoskins. He was the author of the Hoskins Bill that attracted so much attention when it was before the legislature, though it never became law. The hill provided that every prisoner should have a sitting-room as well as a sleeping-room, and that it should be furnished with a piano, a banjo, a library, a typewriter, a wine-cooler, and a whist-table; that the prisoner should be permitted to hold two weekly receptions, to which everybody should be allowed to come, and that he should be taught any branch of study that he might care to take up, books and masters being, of course, supplied free. Colonel Hoskins used to insist that the only thing that made a man go wrong was the lack of kindness, and that the sure way to reform a criminal was to treat him with so much kindness that he would grow ashamed of being wicked, and would fall on everybody’s neck and devote the rest of his life to weeping tears of repentance and singing hymns of joy.

“While Colonel Hoskins was fond of all styles of criminals, burglars were his particular pets. According to him, a burglar was more deserving of kindness than any other man. ‘How would you like it,’ he used to say, ‘if you had to earn your living by breaking into houses in the middle of the night, instead of sleeping peacefully in your bed? Do you think you would be full of good thoughts after you had been bitten by the watch-dog and fired at by the man of the house, and earned nothing by your labor except a bad cold and the prospect of hydrophobia? There is nothing more brutal than the way in which society treats the burglar; and so long as society refuses to put him in the way of earning an easier and less dangerous living, he cannot be blamed if he continues to practise his midnight profession.’

“I must say this for Colonel Hoskins. He did not confine himself to talk, like many other philanthropists, but was always trying to carry out his principles. He really meant what he said about burglars, and there isn’t the least doubt that he had more sympathy for them than he had for the honest men of his acquaintance.

“When people asked him what he would do if he woke up in the night and found a burglar in his house, and whether or not he would shoot at him, he said that he would as soon think of shooting at his own wife, and that he would undertake to reform that burglar, then and there, by kindness alone. Once somebody said to Hoskins that he ought really to let the burglars know his feelings toward them, and Hoskins said that he would do it without delay.

“That same day he drew up a beautiful ‘Notice to Burglars,’ and had it printed in big letters and framed and hung up in the dining-room of his house. It read in this way: ‘Burglars are respectfully informed that the silverware is all plated, and that the proprietor of this house never keeps ready money on hand. Cake and wine will be found in the dining-room closet, and burglars are cordially invited to rest and refresh themselves. Please wipe your feet on the mat, and close the window when leaving the house.’

“Colonel Hoskins took a good deal of pride in that notice. He showed it to every one who called at the house, and said that if other people would follow his example and treat burglars like Christians and gentlemen, there would soon be an end of burglary, for the burglars would be so touched by the kindness of their treatment that they would abandon the business and become honored members of society—insurance presidents, or bank cashiers, or church treasurers. He didn’t say how the reformed burglars were to find employment in banks and insurance offices and such, but that was a matter of detail, and he always preferred to devise large and noble schemes, and leave the working details of them to other men.

“One morning Colonel Hoskins, who was an early riser, went down to the dining-room before breakfast, and was surprised to find that he had had a midnight visit from burglars. Two empty wine-bottles stood on the table, and all the cake was eaten, which showed that the burglars had accepted the invitation to refresh themselves. But they did not seem to have accepted it in quite the right spirit. All Hoskins’ spoons and forks lay in a heap in the middle of the floor, and every one was twisted or broken so as to be good for nothing. The window had been left open and the rain had ruined the curtains, and on a dirty piece of paper the burglars had scrawled with a lead-pencil the opinion that ‘Old Hoskins is the biggest fule and the gol-darndest skinflint in the country. You set out whiskey next time, or we’ll serve you out.’

“Hoskins was not in the least cast down by the rudeness of the burglars. ‘Poor fellows,’ he said, ‘they have been so used to bad treatment that they don’t altogether appreciate kindness at first. But they will learn.’ So he laid in some new spoons and forks and added a bottle of whiskey to the wine that he kept in the closet for the burglars, and was as confident as ever that the next gang that might break into his house would be melted into tears and repentance and would call him their best and dearest friend.

“A week or two later Mrs. Hoskins was awakened by a noise in the dining-room, and after waking up her husband told him that there were burglars in the house, and that he must get out of the back window and go for the police. He told her that he was sorry to see her manifest such an unchristian spirit, and he would show her how burglars ought to be treated. There was not the least doubt that there were burglars in the house, and they were making a good deal more noise than was strictly consistent with the prospect of rising in their profession, for no able burglar ever makes any unnecessary noise while engaged in business, unless, of course, he falls over a coal-scuttle, and then he naturally uses language. St. Paul himself would probably say something pretty strong in similar circumstances. Hoskins was sincerely delighted to have the opportunity to meet his burglarious friends, and he lost no time in dressing and descending to the dining-room.

“He wore his slippers, and the burglars—there were two of them—did not hear him until he was fairly in the dining room. They were seated at the table, with their feet on the damask table-cloth, and the bottle of whiskey was nearly empty. The Colonel was much pleased to see that they had not damaged his silverware, and he was just about to thank them when they saw him. They started up, and one of them caught him by the throat, while the other held a pistol to his head and promised to blow out his brains if he made the slightest noise. Then they tied him hand and foot, gagged him, and laid him on the floor, and then sat down to finish the whiskey.

“Both the burglars were partly drunk, which accounted for the unprofessional noise they had been making. They talked in rather a low tone, but Hoskins could hear everything they said, and it was not particularly encouraging to a gagged and bound philanthropist. They agreed that he was a fool, and a stingy fool, or else he would have kept money in the house, and would have set out lemons and sugar as well as plain whiskey. They said that any man who treated poor working-men in that way wasn’t fit to live, and that Hoskins would have to be killed, even if it was not necessary—as it plainly was in this case—to kill him in order to prevent him from appearing at any future time as a witness against them. They admitted that the whiskey was not bad of its kind, but they were of the opinion that Hoskins had left it in their way so that they might get drunk and be caught by the police.

“Colonel Hoskins listened to this conversation with horror, and the prospect that the drunken rascals would be as good as their word, and kill him before they left the house, was only a little more painful than the conviction that his method, appealing to the better nature of burglars, had failed for the second time. When the whiskey was exhausted the men rose up and looked at Hoskins, and a happy thought struck one of them. ‘Thishyer idiot,’ he said, ‘may not have any money in the house, but he’s bound to have some in the bank, and he’s going to write us a check for a thousand dollars, provided we let him off and don’t kick his brains out this time.’ The other burglar, who was in that benevolent frame of mind that Irish whiskey and conscious virtue sometimes produce, agreed to the suggestion, and Hoskins was therefore unbound and seated at the table, and told to draw a check at once if he had the least regard for his life. As he was gagged he could not explain to the burglars the kind feelings that he still had toward them, and the fact that they could not draw the money on the check without being captured by the police. So he simply signed the check, and groaned to think that the poor burglars were so slow to be reformed in the way that he had hoped they would be.

“When this business was over, the burglars tied Hoskins’ wrists together again and then tied him in a chair. Then they set to work to do all the damage they could do without making too much noise. They tore the curtains and hacked the piano with knives, and poured a jug of golden syrup over the carpet. Then they plastered Colonel Hoskins’ face with raspberry jam and emptied a sack of flour over his head, and went away, telling him that if he ever again ventured to trifle with the feelings of poor but self-respecting men, they would put him to death by slow tortures.

“Hoskins sat in the chair for a couple of hours, till his wife timidly crept downstairs and released him. It took him a good hour to get the jam and the flour out of his hair and whiskers, and as Mrs. Hoskins said that he was in no state to enter a decent bedroom and made him wash at the pump in the back yard, he found it a rather cold operation. Perhaps it was the remarks that Mrs. Hoskins addressed to him during the operation that irritated him, for she intimated very plainly that he was no better than a professional idiot, and when a man’s hair is stuck together with jam, remarks of this sort from the wife of his bosom seem to be lacking in tenderness. However that may be, Colonel Hoskins had no sooner got himself into what his wife condescended to call a state of comparative decency, than he took down his ‘Notice to Burglars’ and tore it into a thousand pieces. That day he had an electric burglar-alarm put into his house, he bought the savagest dog that he could find, and he stopped the payment of the check, which, however, was never presented. He continued to be the President of the Society for Ameliorating the Condition of Prisoners, but he steadily refused to ameliorate a single prisoner convicted of burglary, and while he was always a lunatic in regard to other criminals, he openly maintained that a burglar was the worst of men and that kindness was utterly thrown away upon him. He never had any more burglars in his house, though the dog now and then lunched off warm leg when some stranger to that part of the country ventured into the Hoskins premises at night. Hoskins was very fond of the animal, which was quite right, but his practice of leaving a bottle of whiskey, with an ounce of strychnine in it, on the dining-room table every night, in case a burglar should succeed in getting into the house, was, in my opinion, going a little too far. Antimonial wine would have been much more humane and sufficiently effective. But there is no man who is more severe than a philanthropist who has been turned sour.”

THE CAT’S REVENGE.

We had been discussing the Darwinian hypothesis, and the Colonel had maintained a profound silence, which was sufficient evidence that he did not believe in the development of man from the lower animals. Some one, however, asked him plumply his opinion of Darwinism, and he sententiously replied, “Darned nonsense!”

Feeling that this view of the matter possibly merited expansion, the Colonel caused his chair to assume its customary oratorical attitude on its two rear legs, and began to discourse.

“There are some things,” he remarked, “which do look as if there might be a grain of truth in this monkey theory. For instance, when I was in France I was pretty nearly convinced that the monkey is the connecting link between man and the Frenchmen, but after all there is no proof of it. That’s what’s the matter with Darwinism. When you produce a man who can remember that his grandfather was a monkey, or when you show me a monkey that can produce papers to prove that he is my second cousin, I’ll believe all Darwin said on the subject; but as the thing stands I’ve nothing but Darwin’s word to prove that men and monkeys are near relations. So far as I can learn, Darwin didn’t know as much about animals as a man ought to know who undertakes to invent a theory about them. He never was intimate with dogs and he never drove an army mule. He had a sort of bowing acquaintance with monkeys and a few other animals of no particular standing in the community, but he couldn’t even understand a single animal language. Now, if he had gone to work and learned to read and write and speak the monkey language, as that American professor that you were just speaking of has done, he might have been able to give us some really valuable information.

“Do I believe that animals talk? I don’t simply believe it, I know it. When I was a young man I had a good deal to do with animals, and I learned to understand the cat language just as well as I understood English. It’s an easy language when once you get the hang of it, and from what I hear of German the two are considerably alike. You look as if you didn’t altogether believe me, though why you should doubt that a man can learn cat language when the world is full of men that pretend to have learned German, and nobody calls their word in question, I don’t precisely see.

“Of course, I don’t pretend to understand all the cat dialects. For example, I don’t know a word of the Angora dialect and can only understand a sentence here and there of the tortoise-shell dialect; but so far as good, pure standard cat language goes, it’s as plain as print to me to-day, though I haven’t paid any attention to it for forty years. I don’t want you to understand that I ever spoke it. I always spoke English when I was talking with cats. They all understand English as well as you do. They pick it up just as a child picks up a language from hearing it spoken.

“Forty years ago I was a young man, and, like most young men, I fancied that I was in love with a young woman of our town. There isn’t the least doubt in my mind that I should have married her if I had not known the cat language. She afterward married a man whom she took away to Africa with her as a missionary. I knew him well, and he didn’t want to go to Africa. Said he had no call to be a missionary, and that all he wanted was to live in a Christian country where he could go and talk with the boys in the bar-room evenings. But his wife carried him off, and it’s my belief that if I had married her she would have made me turn missionary, or pirate, or anything else that she thought best. I shall never cease to be grateful to Thomas Aquinas for saving me from that woman.

“This was the way of it. I was living in a little cottage that belonged to my uncle, and that he let me have rent free on condition that I should take care of it and keep the grounds in an attractive state until he could sell it. I had an old negro housekeeper and two cats. One of them, Martha Washington by name, was young and handsome, and about as bright a cat as I ever knew. She had a strong sense of humor, too, which is unusual with cats, and when something amused her she would throw back her head and open her mouth wide, and laugh a silent laugh that was as hearty and rollicking as a Methodist parson’s laugh when he hears a gray-haired joke at a negro minstrel show. Martha was perhaps the most popular cat in the town, and there was scarcely a minute in the day when there wasn’t some one of her admirers in the back yard. As for serenades, she had three or four every night that it didn’t rain. There was a quartette club formed by four first-class feline voices, and the club used to give Martha and me two or three hours of music three times a week. I used sometimes to find as many as six or seven old boots in the back yard of a morning that had been contributed by enthusiastic neighbors. As for society, Martha Washington was at the top of the heap. There wasn’t a more fashionable cat in the whole State of Ohio—I was living in Ohio at the time—and in spite of it all she was as simple and unaffected in her ways as if she had been born and bred in a Quaker meeting-house.

“One afternoon Martha was giving a four-o’clock milk on the veranda next to my room. I always gave her permission to give that sort of entertainment whenever she wanted to, for the gossip of her friends used to be very amusing to me. Among the guests that afternoon was Susan’s Maltese cat. Susan was the young lady I wanted to marry. Now, this cat had always pretended to be very fond of me, and Susan often said that her cat never made a mistake in reading character, and that the cat’s approval of me was equivalent to a first-class Sunday-school certificate of moral character. I didn’t care anything about the cat myself, for somehow I didn’t place any confidence in her professions. There was an expression about her tail which, to my mind, meant that she was insincere and treacherous. The Maltese cat had finished her milk, when the conversation drifted around to the various mistresses of the cats, and presently some one spoke of Susan. Then the Maltese began to say things about Susan that made my blood boil. It was not only what she said, but what she insinuated, and according to her Susan was one of the meanest and most contemptible women in the whole United States. I stood it as long as I could, and then I got up and said to Martha Washington, ‘I think your Maltese friend is needed at her home, and the sooner she goes the better if she doesn’t want to be helped home with a club.’ That was enough. The Maltese, who was doing up her back fur when I spoke, stopped, looked at me as if she could tear me into pieces, and then flounced out of the house without saying a word. I understood that there was an end to her pretence of friendship for me, and that henceforth I should have an enemy in Susan’s house who might, perhaps, be able to do me a good deal of harm.

“The next time I called to see Susan the Maltese was in the room, and she instantly put up her back and tail and swore at me as if I was a Chinaman on the lookout for material for a stolen dinner. ‘What can be the matter with poor pussy?’ said Susan. ‘She seems to be so terribly afraid of you all of a sudden. I hope it doesn’t mean that you have been doing something that she doesn’t approve of.’ I didn’t make any reply to this insinuation, except to say that the cat might perhaps be going mad, but this didn’t help me any with Susan, who was really angry at the idea that her cat could be capable of going mad.

“The same sort of thing happened every time I went to the house. The cat was always in the room, and always expressed, in the plainest way, the opinion that I was a thief and a murderer and an enemy of the temperance society. When I asked her what she meant to do, she would give me no reply except a fresh oath or other bad language. Threats had no effect on her, for she knew that I could not touch her in Susan’s house, and she didn’t intend that I should catch her outside of the house. Nothing was clearer than that the Maltese was bound to make a quarrel between me and Susan, in revenge for what I had said at Martha’s four-o’clock milk.

“Meanwhile Susan began to take the thing very seriously, and hinted that the cat’s opposition to me might be a providential warning against me. ‘I never knew her to take such a prejudice against any one before,’ she said, ‘except against that converted Jew who afterward turned out to be a burglar, and nearly murdered poor dear Mr. Higby, the Baptist preacher, the night he broke into Mr. Higby’s house and stole all his hams.’ Once when I did manage to give the Maltese a surreptitious kick, and she yelled as if she was half-killed, Susan said, ‘I am really afraid I shall have to ask you to leave us now. Poor pussy’s nerves are so thoroughly upset that I must devote all my energies to soothing her. I do hope she is mistaken in her estimate of you.’ This was not very encouraging, and I saw clearly that if the Maltese kept up her opposition the chances that Susan would marry me were not worth a rush.