Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/286

262 Polly came to this country in 1861. She bore the voyage impatiently, making our state-room hideous by her complainings, and was so ill-natured that, to warn visitors not to approach too near, we hung a placard "she bites" upon her cage. Under the July sun of Columbia county, New York, however, she shortly recovered her good temper, and, barring an occasional attack of gout in her feet, continued in good health up to this last winter. She had then reached the age of eighty years. Without considering the exhausted resources of advanced life to meet severe cold, she was committed to Adams's Express to be taken on to Washington City during the severest night of the season, and froze to death on the way. The taxidermist of the Smithsonian Institute has done his best to preserve the bird's mortal part, and restore it to our sight. But he had never seen Polly alive, and has failed. As her form, perched on a spray, rises above the bracket before me, it is but the mockery of the queenly bird—the arched neck, and knowing look, and graceful posture, and princely bearing, are no longer there. As the gravedigger said to Hamlet about poor Ophelia (varying a single word)—"One that was a parrot, sir; but, rest her soul, she's dead."

Y London doctor regarded me quietly over his spectacles, as I finished the recital of my bodily ailments, and then, with the corners of his mouth well drawn down, and a general appearance of having often heard the same thing before, proceeded to explain the causes of my ailment, and summed up by saying that I ought to go to Kissingen for three or four weeks.

I cannot say that I was altogether pleased. I had expected to be sent on a little tour in Switzerland, or a month at Baden Baden or Biarritz. As for this place Kissingen, I had never heard of anybody's going there, and scarcely knew where it was. It might have caught my eye on the map, and I was certainly familiar with the salty beverage of the same name dispensed at the Fifth avenue drug-store; but to be actually sent off to an obscure German spring for three weeks! It made me home-sick to think of it.

This was on or about the first of June, 1867. A day or two afterward, we glided out of the great railway station at Charing Cross, over the Thames and the dingy roofs of the London houses, and across the Kentish fields, down to the white cliffs of Dover. Thence across the Channel ferry, and on through the queer old towns of France and Belgium—up along the Rhine—past the Drachenfels and Ehrenbreitstein and Bingen—and off toward the Bavarian frontier—till I found myself at last, on a chilly Saturday afternoon, at the place where I was to leave the railway, and take a six hours' ride by diligence into Kissingen. It was nearly dark when I was received by the porter of the Hotel de Russie, and went submissively to the first room that was shown me, anxious only for rest, and leaving the morrow to take thought for itself.

A wet Sunday in a place where you don't know a soul, and can't speak the language, is not, of course, a very cheerful beginning. I was gratified, however,