Aileen Aroon, A Memoir. Stables Gordon

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СКАЧАТЬ often taken from her, for any of the cats, or the smaller dogs, thought nothing of helping the noble creature to drink her drop of milk of a morning.

      Aileen, when they came to her assistance in this way, would raise her own head from the dish, and look down at them for a time in her kindly way.

      “You appear to be very hungry,” she would seem to say, “perhaps more so than I am, and so I’ll leave you to drink it all.”

      Then Aileen would walk gently away, and throw herself down beneath the table with a sigh.

      There was a time when illness prevented me from leaving my room for many days, but as I had some serials going on in magazines, I could not afford to leave off working; I used, therefore, to write in my bedroom. As soon as she got up of a morning, often and often before she had her breakfast, Aileen would come slowly upstairs. I knew her quiet but heavy footsteps. Presently she would open the door about half-way, and look in. If I said nothing she would make a low and apologetic bow, and when I smiled she advanced.

      “I’m not sure if my feet be over clean,” she would seem to say as she put her head on my lap with the usual deep-drawn sigh, “but I really could not help coming upstairs to see how you were this morning.”

      Presently I would hear more padded footsteps on the stairs. This was the saucy champion Theodore Nero himself, there could be no mistake about that. He came upstairs two or three steps at a time, and flung the half-open door wide against the wall, then bounded into the room like a June thunderstorm. He would give one quick glance at Aileen.

      “Hallo!” he would say, talking with eyes and tail, “you’re here, are you, old girl? Keeping the master company, eh? Well, I’m not very jealous. How goes it this morning, master?”

      Nero always brought into the sick-room about a hundredweight at least of jollity, sprightliness, life, and love. It used to make me better to see him, and make me long to be up and about, and out in the dear old pine woods again.

      “You always seem to be well and happy, Nero,” I said to him one day; “how do you manage it?”

      “Wait,” said Nero, “till I’ve finished this chop bone, and I’ll tell you what you should do in order to be always the same as I am now.”

      As there is some good in master Nero’s receipt, I give it here in fall.

A Dog’s Receipt for Keeping Well

      “Get up in the morning as soon as the birds begin to sing, and if you’re not on chain, take a good run round the garden. Always sleep in the open air. Don’t eat more breakfast than is good for you, and take the same amount of dinner. Don’t eat at all if you’re not hungry. Eat plenty of grass, or green vegetables, if you like that better. Take plenty of exercise. Running is best; but if you don’t run, walk, and walk, and walk till you’re tired; you will sleep all the better for it. One hour’s sleep after exercise is deeper, and sweeter, and sounder, and more refreshing than five hours induced by port-wine negus. Don’t neglect the bath; I never do. Whenever I see a hole with water in it, I just jump in and swim around, then come out and dance myself dry. Do good whenever you can; I always do. Be brave, yet peaceful. Be generous, charitable, and honest. Never refuse a bit to a beggar, and never steal a bone from a butcher; so shall you live healthfully and happy, and die of the only disease anybody has any right to die of – sheer old age.”

      I never saw a dog appreciate a joke better than did poor Nero. He had that habit of showing his teeth in a broad smile, which is common to the Newfoundland and collie.

      Here is a little joke that Nero once unintentionally perpetrated. He had a habit of throwing up the gravel with his two immense hinder paws, quite regardless of consequences. A poor little innocent mite of a terrier happened one day to be behind master Nero, when he commenced to scrape. The shower of stones and gravel came like the discharge from a mitrailleuse on the little dog, and fairly threw him on his back. Nero happened to look about at the same time, and noticed what he had done.

      “Oh!” he seemed to say as he broke into a broad grin, “this is really too ridiculous, too utterly absurd.”

      Then bounding across a ditch and through a hedge, he got into a green field, where he at once commenced his usual plan of working off steam, when anything extra-amusing tickled him, namely, that of running round and round and round in a wide circle. Many dogs race like this, no doubt for this reason: they can by so doing enjoy all the advantages of a good ran, without going any appreciable distance away from where master is. Apropos of dogs gambolling and racing for the evident purpose of getting rid of an extra amount of animal electricity, I give an extract here from a recent book of mine2. The sketch is painted from real life.

Dogs in the Snow in Greenland

      “The exuberance of great ‘Oscar’s’ joy when out with his master for a walk was very comical to witness. Out for a walk did I say? Nay, that word but poorly expresses the nature of Oscar’s pedal progression. It was not a walk, but a glorious compound of dance, scamper, race, gallop, and gambol. Had you been ever so old it would have made you feel young again to behold him. He knew while Allan was dressing that he meant to go out, and began at once to exhibit signs of impatience. He would yawn and stretch himself, and wriggle and shake; then he would open his mouth, and try to round a sentence in real verbal English, and tailing in this, fall back upon dog language, pure and simple, or he would stand looking at Allan with his beautiful head turned on one side, and his mouth a little open, just sufficiently so to show the tip of his bright pink tongue, and his brown eyes would speak to his master. ‘Couldn’t you,’ the dog would seem to ask – ‘couldn’t you get on your coat a little – oh, ever so little – faster? What can you want with a muffler? I don’t wear a muffler. And now you are looking for your fur cap, and there it is right before your very eyes!’

      “‘And,’ the dog would add, ‘I daresay we are off at last,’ and he would hardly give his master time to open the companion door for him.

      “But once over the side, ‘Hurrah!’ he would seem to say, then away he would bound, and away, and away, and away, straight ahead as crow could fly, through the snow and through the snow, which rose around him in feathery clouds, till he appeared but a little dark speck in the distance. This race straight ahead was meant to get rid of his super-extra steam. Having expended this, back he would come with a rush, and a run, make pretence to jump his master down, but dive past him at the last moment. Then he would gambol in front of his master in such a daft and comical fashion that made Allan laugh aloud; and, seeing his master laughing, Oscar would laugh too, showing such a double regiment of white, flashing, pearly teeth, that, with the quickness of the dog’s motions, they seemed to begin at his lips and go right away down both sides of him as far as the tail.

      “Hurroosh! hurroosh! Each exclamation, reader, is meant to represent a kind of a double-somersault, which I verily believe Oscar invented himself. He performed it by leaping off the ground, bending sideways, and going right round like a top, without touching the snow, with a spring like that of a five-year-old salmon getting over a weir.

      “Hurroosh! hurroosh!

      “Then Allan would make a grab at his tail.

      “‘Oh, that’s your game!’ Oscar would say; ‘then down you go!’

      “And down Allan would roll, half buried in the powdery snow, and not be able to get up again for laughing; then away Oscar would rush wildly round and round in a complete circle, having a radius of some fifty yards, with Allan McGregor on his broad back for a centre.”

      Theodore Nero was as full of sauciness and chique as ever was an Eton boy home for the holidays, or a midshipman on shore for a cruise. The СКАЧАТЬ