Cowper’s Tame Hares.
“They look exactly like other hares,” said an undiscriminating lady; but the poet did not agree with her; for him each had its differing ways and whims, its own individuality. Little Puss, for instance, grew quite tame, was affectionate, and grateful for kindness; while Tiney would not suffer the slightest caress—being gruff and surly, a little Diogenes in fur; and Bess never had to be tamed, but was docile from the first, and took a humorous delight in playing tricks on her companions. Bess died young, surly Tiney lived nine years; and Puss, the best beloved of all, died of a hare’s old age when within a month of completing his twelfth year. Deep was his master’s grief; long and sincere his mourning.
The slow tortoise has had almost as many friends as the agile hare, but none more famous than Mr. Gilbert White of Selborne. In 1770, while visiting an old friend, he observed in her garden a land tortoise, which had been there, she told him, for the last thirty years. Timothy, the pet’s name, spent nearly half of his life in retirement, but in the other half had learned to recognize his mistress and to come at her call. On her death, some ten years later, he passed into the possession of Mr. White; and in March was dug out of the ground to accompany his new master to Selborne. He took the transfer in high dudgeon; so much so that immediately on arriving he went into winter quarters again, and staid there until May. The fourteenth of this month he walked out in the garden, and found it more to his mind than he expected, with nice paths, soft, short grass, and plenty of succulent vegetables. He gained rapidly in health and spirits, and after a few months was able to dictate a letter for Miss Mulso, a letter almost as good as that of little Nero to Carlyle.
After telling her that by birth he was a Virginian, and that he had been kidnapped into England, he speaks of his happy life with the lady now deceased, as contrasted with the disquietude he suffers in having a naturalist for a master, and being all the time a subject for experiments. “Your sorrowful reptile, Timothy,” he concludes. What became of him eventually, I cannot say. Turtles are proverbially long lived; but if Timothy is dead let us trust that he left a small reptilian ghost, still to wander through the garden of his fame.
Quite famous in their day were the chameleons of Mlle. de Saudéry, a seventeenth century novelist. One of the kindest-hearted women in France, she was continually giving to the poor, or appealing for the distressed; so that her fame to-day rests rather upon her charities than her writings. Her chameleons excited much curiosity, and strangers went to see them, as one of the sights of the city. The last glimpse we get of them in history is a post-mortem one, in 1698, when Dr. Martin Lister visited Paris, and called upon the venerable novelist—then in her ninety-first year. She made herself very agreeable, and finally, he says, took him to her closet and showed him “the skeletons of two chameleons which she had kept near four years alive. In winter she lodged them in cotton, and in the fiercest weather kept them under a ball of copper filled with hot water.”
The good lady would have sympathized with Antonia, Mark Antony’s beautiful daughter, who petted the murenæ in her fish-ponds, and of one in particular became so fond that she fastened gold ear-rings to its head—a favor the poor fish could well have spared.
Washington Irving upheld the right of harmless snakes to live in peace; and a pretty story is told of his preventing a guest from killing a little striped adder—pointing the lesson of tolerance by gently stroking his protégé.
The great Goethe was in full accord with this feeling. He kept a snake for some months, feeding it himself, and caring for it, until his interest, scientific at first, became personal and affectionate. The creature became quite friendly, and would uprear its head in recognition, whenever the master approached.
The poet’s mother once alluded to his favorite—rather femininely—as “a nasty thing.” “Oh,” said her son, “if the snake would but spin himself a house, and turn into a butterfly to oblige her, we should hear no more about ‘nasty things.’ But we can’t all be butterflies.... Poor snake! they should treat you better. How he looks at me! how he rears his head! Is it not as if he knew that I was taking his part?”