“Thine eye was bright, thy coat it shone;
Thou hadst thine errands off and on;
In joy thine last morn flew; anon,
A fit! All’s over;
And thou art gone where Geist hath gone,
And Toss and Rover.”
It is the fashion of mortality to pass away—but that does not alter the sadness of it—of losing what we love. As surely as we have friends or pets, so surely shall we know the pain of loss—fortunate only if there has been between us such true love that the memory thereof abides. Such love there was between Mr. Edmund Yates and Nelly, the story of whose life he told me in the following letter of September, 1887:
“Your letter finds me mourning the loss of the one pet animal of my life. In the year 1878, having taken a country place, and being in want of an animal as companion, I went to the Dogs’ Home at Battersea, and on visiting the kennels, was at once struck with the piteous and earnest expression on the face of a female collie, looking up, with many others, through the wire netting; an expression which said, as plainly as possible, ‘Take me out of this, for Heaven’s sake, and I will be loving and true.’ I could learn nothing of her previous history, but I paid a sovereign for her, and took her away with me in a cab; and from that hour to the day of her death, just two months ago, Nelly, as I called her, was the light of my household, and won the admiration and love of all who saw her.
NELLY, THE DOG OF EDMUND YATES.