GENERAL MUFF, MISS MARY L. BOOTH’S CAT.
All who are familiar with the poem by Matthew Arnold, on Geist’s Grave, or another, on Kaiser, Dead, know the story, told as he alone could tell it, of this great author’s pets.
The dachshund Geist lived four brief years, then “humbly laid” him “down to die.” Dearly loved, remembered always—often and often would his friends recall his “liquid, melancholy eye,” his wistful face at the window, the scuffle of his feet upon the stair, and his “small, black figure on the snow.” But “there is no photograph of poor little Geist,” says Mr. Arnold, “except one taken after his death, which gives pleasure to us, but could give it to no one else. There is, however, an excellent portrait of another dog of mine, Max, in a birthday book from my poems, but it is weighted by a very bad portrait of his master.”
This was the Max of the poem, who “with downcast, reverent head” had looked upon “Kaiser, dead”—“Kaiser,” once the blithest, happiest of dogs, supposed at first to be pure dachshund, until at length with—
“The collie hair, the collie swing,
The tail’s indomitable ring,
The eye’s unrest—
The case was clear; a mongrel thing
‘Kai’ stood confest.”
All the same—