Mew IV.
Further Adventures of Blinks.
After the dreadful adventure related in chapter third, exhausted nature coveted nutrition; that is, Blinks felt thirsty, and for the suck-seeding [succeeding] sixty minutes, Blinks was busily engaged discussing a dinner of tit-bits. He wandered from one tit to another, and from the other tit to the next, and so on to the last, and then back again to the first.
Couldn’t he stick to one tit? “No, sirree!” Blinks would have replied, “the foremost tits contain butter, the next cream, the next sweet milk, and the last whey. My brethren and sistren should have got the whey—they should, but then my brethren were drowned in the sistren [cistern]—good joke, that, for a nine-days’ wonder. Eh?”
Having at length satisfied the cravings of nature, and filled his belly [Blinks fainted when he heard this expression, and on reviving bade me, try again], well, then having laid up a little store of the lacteal fluid, against further claims for sustenance, Blinks carefully put aside the skim-milk tit, as a thing all very good in its way, but which a hero 216 hours old, and with real eyes, ought to despise. He laid it past, and wheeling carefully round on one end, stood up, staggered for an instant, and finally reopened his new organs as wide as he could, and stared right in front of him, apparently with no very decided intention of what to do or how to do it. Just then there fell upon his listening ears—he had two, one for each eye, and was very proud of them too—a sound which made him start and turn red, so to speak, with indignation.
“Was it possible?” he mused. “Did his ears deceive him? Did he hear a laugh? A laugh! nay, even a sneer, a low snigger.”
He gazed steadily in the direction from which the noise seemed to proceed; and “dang his eyes” if it wasn’t repeated, wantonly repeated, daringly done again; and evidently the insult was aimed at him, for there, not many miles away, at most, were two great round goggle eyes a-glowering at him over a book, and a horrid great fleshy face all round them, with tufts of bristly hairs hanging from the cheeks, and a mouth with lips from which again came the sneer—the low insulting snigger.
Now Blinks, in the days of his darkness, had often heard the same despicable sound; and Blinks’s mamma called the voice Master.
“What!” thought he, “Blinks have a master! Blinks, the nine days’ wonder! Blinks, with two real eyes! But, dash those same two eyes! the thought was slavish. No, he wouldn’t give a suck for himself if he would bear it; and then that laugh, that snigger—come, he would at once go on the war-path, find out this ogre which his mamma,—the old idgit [idiot]—called master; and demolish for ever, and crush into the minutest smithereens, the mouth that dared to sneer, the lips that dared to snigger. Dash his eyes if he didn’t, that was all.”
“Walking was difficult, though,” so Blinks continued to muse and talk, “over a confounded rug too. Would his ma kindly take her stupid, awkward-looking stump of a tail out of his way? So-ho-oh! Gently! Hang it all!”
With this last exclamation Blinks tumbled off the rug, fell three long inches through the air, and screamed lustily for his ma.
“My ma! my ma!” roared Blinks.
“My chee-ild! my chee-ild!” cried his ma, “I am with thee, my chee-ild;” and he was forthwith carried by the nape of his warlike neck to his downy bed, and—happy thought—he would have a drink, and then ask his ma to get him a little golden carriage, with four white mice as horses, and a boy-mouse in buttons behind. For why? He, Blinks, was never made to walk, nor meant to walk, nor did he mean to walk; for it was mean to walk, and he couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t. So from thinking Blinks came to dreaming; then he once more slumbered and slept, while his mother, sitting over him, nodded and sang.