Chose was a light-hearted French poodle, with a strong taste for sport, which had, unluckily, never been developed in the right direction. Sheep appeared to him to be quite legitimate game, and he never could see them without trying to sneak off in their direction, with a drooping tail and general air of depression, which may have been caused by a consciousness of wrongdoing, or else by fear of being recalled before he was out of reach, and thus deprived of the chasse on which his heart was set. As for birds, he considered all to be fair game alike, and rushed madly after any feathered creature that was sitting or running on the ground, or flying low anywhere near him. Repeated failure did not discourage him; he evidently believed it to be his mission to catch birds, and dashed off accordingly in frantic pursuit of rooks, swallows, chaffinches, sparrows, and other birds on the wing, though he had no more chance of catching them than he had of jumping over the moon. This was all very well when he hunted wild birds that could fly away; but it was a more serious matter when poultry were concerned, and the scrapes he got into with ducks and chickens in the course of his career would require a chapter to enumerate.
Finally, I come to Jumbo, a diminutive terrier, with a mania for digging, who was the abomination of all the gardeners in his neighbourhood. Soft, freshly-turned earth was an irresistible temptation to him; and if not watched carefully, he was sure to slip off to the nearest flower-bed in park, square, or garden, and there dig gigantic graves in a surprisingly short space of time. I expect he thought that, considering what a lot of moles, rabbits, rats, and mice had holes underground, he must infallibly light upon some one of these creatures at last, if he persevered in his researches long enough. He had also a weakness for flowers, and liked to pick them for himself; so, altogether, I don't wonder he was not loved by gardeners, one of whom once remarked to me indignantly:
"That 'ere dawg o' yourn is the werry wusstest little beast I ever see! I'd just like to take and give 'im to one o' them 'ere willysectin doctors, that I would!"
Well, those six dogs gave me a good bit of trouble in one way or other, no doubt; and all the more because their mistress spoilt them, and did not try to get them out of their bad ways, and they were not with me long enough for me to be able to undo the effect of her spoiling. But they amused me and I liked them, notwithstanding their troublesomeness; and when I went near them it pleased me to hear the thump thump of tails against the ground, which showed that I was welcome.
The Torwoods kept no indoor man-servant except the butler already mentioned, who rejoiced in the name of Eliezer Scroggins; and as he was a respectable, steady-going married man, I found, to my great satisfaction, that I was in no danger of suffering from persecutions like those of the detestable Perkins. I got on very well with Scroggins, and was often amused by his peculiarities; for he was (as I had guessed at first) somewhat of a character, though a very good sort of fellow, for all that. His prejudices were very strong, and he was sure to cling with pigheaded obstinacy to whatever idea he had taken into his head. I soon discovered that amongst his pet aversions were people who, in his opinion, gave themselves airs, and presumed to push their way up to a station above that in which they had been born. Such people he hated as he hated stairs—perhaps more; and no matter whether they moved in his mistress's sphere of life or his own, they irritated him as the proverbial red rag does the bull. Indeed, I rather suspect that he sometimes had premeditated accidents when any of these objects of his dislike were dining at the Torwoods, and that any visitor of theirs who was considered by him to be what he called a "parvenyoo" was not at all unlikely to receive a bath of soup, sauce, tea, coffee, or wine, or to suffer from some similar misadventure, caused by the intentional clumsiness of the butler.
His bitterness on the subject of people who had risen above their natural position was so great that I had little doubt of there being some particular reason for it; and idle curiosity moved me to try and find out what that reason was, though I never for an instant supposed that the history could be one in any way specially concerning me. However, he did not choose to confide his private family affairs to a complete stranger; and so, though he dropped occasional dark hints, whence I concluded that he had a step-sister whom he detested, yet it was not till I had been nearly a year in Mrs. Torwood's service that I at last was permitted to know the cause of his inveterate spite against the whole race of parvenus.
His mother, it appeared, had been twice married, and he was her child by the second marriage. Her first husband was a clerk named Brown, who had died before he was thirty, leaving only one child, a daughter named Mary. He had had rather exalted ideas about education, and had no opinion of home teaching, and consequently had sent his daughter to a cheap boarding-school as soon as ever she was old enough to leave home.
After Brown's death his young widow had married into a social position a shade below that of the clerk, and become the spouse of a grocer in the East End, named Joshua Scroggins, to whom in due time she presented my friend Eliezer, and sundry other children.
On the second marriage the grocer, a good-hearted conscientious man, had declared that it would be a shame for her daughter Mary not to have the same education as her own father would have given her, so he generously went on paying for her at the school where she had been already placed. Here the girl picked up a fair education, and also many ridiculous and fine ideas. She took to spell her name with an "e" at the end; would sooner have died than let her school-fellows know that she was connected with a small retail shopkeeper bearing a name so odiously vulgar as Scroggins; and brooded over the grievance of having so unpresentable a step-father, until she became convinced he had done her a mortal injury by marrying her mother, and got into the habit of disliking and despising him in spite of the kindness and liberality with which he always treated her. Now Scroggins was an honest hard-working man, who minded his shop in person, with the assistance of his wife and children; though he had managed to defray Mary's schooling, yet the expense had now and then pressed on him a little heavily, and he had not the least intention of keeping her as an idle fine lady when she left school for good and came to live at home, but expected her to take her turn in the shop, as the rest of the household did. Her disgust at this was intense, and she showed it by doing her work as badly as she dared, scolding and flouncing about the house, and losing no opportunity of making herself generally disagreeable.
The Scroggins family—consisting of father and mother, and four children, of whom my friend Eliezer was the eldest—had hitherto lived in unbroken peace and harmony, and now groaned sorely under the infliction of the new-comer, with her airs and graces and tantrums. The recollection of her being fatherless kept them from resenting her nonsense as it deserved, and made them more gentle and patient with her than they would perhaps have been otherwise; but it was felt by all to be a blessed relief when the disturbing element was removed by marriage to a city gent. He was in business, but did not keep a shop, and so she graciously condescended to accept him as a means of escape from the intolerable humiliation of serving behind her step-father's counter. The city gent proved a good speculation. A few lucky ventures gave him a rise in the world; and when, in the course of years, he left her a widow, her social position was very considerably better than it had been when she first became his wife. By the time he died, all intercourse between her and the Scrogginses had long been at an end. Though she had not hesitated to receive a dowry from her step-father, yet she had never evinced the smallest gratitude for that, or any of the numerous other benefits he had bestowed upon her. On the contrary, she took no trouble to conceal her aversion to him; declared that vulgarity was necessarily attached to such a name as Scroggins; and, after her marriage, saw less and less of the family, and rudely checked all friendly advances on their part, till at last she succeeded in altogether cutting the connection. Mrs. Scroggins—a peace-loving, kindly soul, who could not bear to be mixed up in any kind of dissension—was grieved by this, and by the separation from her daughter, though it was no fault of hers, and she could not possibly help it. But she bore no malice, and when the news came of her son-in-law's death, she thought only of her daughter's present distress, and forgot the many slights and insults that had been cast upon her and hers. Full of unaffected hearty sorrow and sympathy, she set off immediately to visit the bereaved Mary, hoping to be able to comfort her and be of use to her. What took place on the occasion of this visit Eliezer never exactly knew. But he knew well that the reception of his good-hearted and forgiving mother must have been both unseemly and unpleasant, when he saw her return home in tears, thoroughly upset, and saying that she could not have believed any woman would have behaved so rudely to her own mother; and that, unless she was sent for, she would never again try to see Mary. This had made a deep impression on Eliezer, who adored his mother; and the bitter enmity he had ever since cherished against the person who had treated her so badly, and whom he regarded as an upstart, had extended to the whole race of "parvenyoos."