Page:ONCE A WEEK JUL TO DEC 1860.pdf/297

8, 1860.] always within reach of water, and that they were not out in the sun all through the dog-days. The surgeon said that he should, in any suspicious case, administer large doses of chloroform, internally and externally, and, if that did not avail, shoot the poor creature at once.

Harry ought to have been long asleep when we returned home; but we heard the voice of wailing from his bed as soon as we entered the house. He knew that Mopsy was dead, and could not be comforted. He was so fevered and miserable that my wife took him up, and brought him to me, to talk over our misfortune, by way of relieving his mind. We agreed that Mopsy should be buried in the garden, and that something should be put at the head of the grave. What should it be? I drew the inkstand towards me to write the inscription.

“What shall we put, dear?” asked his mother, as the child sat in her lap, with his eyes glittering as he fixed them on the lamp.

“Mopsy!” cried he, with a fresh burst of grief. What could be better? “Mopsy,” with the date.

The settling this so far relieved the child that, in spite of the new outburst, his composure was returning. In a few minutes more he was carried to bed asleep. The sympathising mother could not but look in upon the girls, aware how Bell must be feeling the first bereavement by death that she had known. Both were asleep, not without traces of tears on their faces, and Bell’s handkerchief was soaked. Her mother put a dry one in the place of it, and would not even kiss her, for fear of waking her. We trusted that another generation would be free from the evil of this dreadful disease, by which several households within my own knowledge have been made desolate. Those may be grateful who have their warning in so mild a form as the loss of a dog. I have seen the supporting sons of a widowed mother, the brothers of dependent sisters, die, the one after the other, from the bite of the pet dog, itself infected by an attack from a strange dog in the street. The little favourite flew at their mother in the passage, and fastened on her clothes. The sons ran, and got it into a bag, but not before it had inflicted a slight wound on a hand of each. They thought nothing of it till the elder sickened, finding himself unable to endure the air on his face on the top of a stage-coach. Then he knew what was coming; and when the younger brother stood at his grave, and went about in his new mourning, doing the work of both for the family support, he knew what more was coming. In a little he was buried beside his brother. While there are such stories of any date told in every county and town in England, it is a lesson to dwellers in all towns and villages to erect drinking-fountains, every one of which should have a trough for dogs.

“We must try what the pretty feathers will do again,” my wife and I agreed. We thought she and the children might share the sport the first day, during which I, for one, seldom go very far from home. We would bury Mopsy before I set forth, and then the preparation of lunch, and the prospect of the day’s adventures, might dry up the tears and disperse the grief for the time.

I charged my wife with having quizzed us all round, in her own mind, at the Hall. I had seen the beginning of a satirical smile more than once; and now, sad at heart as she was, she could not help laughing at the importance of the event of the morrow as reflected on to-day. No women were ever more occupied with a fancy ball, she declared. She had little doubt some of the gentlemen were awake and up before we were asleep, to inspect the sky to windward, and among them there would be a watch kept upon the weather all night.

There was not much ground for discussion about the weather when the morning came; and, as for the wind, there was none. For this time we had a perfect September morning. The obsequies of poor Mopsy and an early breakfast being over, I was in the park by seven o’clock. I am looked upon as a sort of auxiliary gamekeeper on these occasions, not only from my thorough acquaintance with the ground for a dozen miles round, but from my habit of marking the coveys in the walks of preceding weeks. So I had two strangers for my comrades, and familiar dogs to help us.

The mists had not yet risen above the tree-tops in the park, and the atmosphere had the singular clearness observable under a low stratum of mist. It seemed as if we could count the leaves on the wooded hill-side opposite, though several fields lay between. The dew glittered on every weed and twig in the hedges the moment the slant rays of the sun touched our path. The gossamer seemed to extend as far as there was sunlight to show it. It trembled slightly, but there was not wind enough to toss it, “as if the fairies were shaking their blankets,” as Jane says. Still as the air was, it was not silent, as it would be towards noon. If we passed a thicket we heard the young goldfinches and thrushes trying their j pipes; it is the spring-time of their lives, though the autumn of our year. Near the first farmstead the swallows were all telling what month it was by the peculiar warble in which they all joined from every roof-tile and out-house and stack. The robin perched among the hips in the hedge, and twittered in his homely way. The screech of the peacock was not so pleasant, but we should soon leave him behind, and meantime he treated us with a spread of his tail on the park-wall in the full sunlight. The hasty tumultuous bark of the dogs at the Hall was subsiding as they went out with their masters in various directions; but the shrill bellowing of the bull in the meadow below had been roused by them, and now it woke the echo from the hill-side. We heard the jingle of the plough-team from the fallow, which was making ready for the autumn wheat-sowing. A loud laugh from over the hedge made us look up; and there were man and boy, trimming and thatching a rick. One of my comrades, Nelson, a London lawyer, asked whether it was not full late for that sort of work; but we presently showed him the difference between a stack finished off before the contents had settled, and therefore out of shape in various directions, and a rick properly matured for the thatching. He was of opinion that this sort of work might be done by a mechanical process less costly than human labour. We