“Could you put this one back? He seems all right—only sort of naked in spots.”
“We’ll half cover the basket and hang it in the tree. His folks’ll take care of him.”
Next morning early there began the greatest to-do among the robins in the orchard. They shrieked their comments on the affair at the top of their lungs. They screamed abusively at Jonathan and me as we stood watching. “They say we did it!” said Jonathan. “I call that gratitude!”
I wish I could record that from that evening the cat was a reformed character. An impression had indeed been made. All next day she stayed under the porch, two glowing eyes in the dark. The second day she came out, walking indifferent and debonair, as cats do. But when Jonathan took down the basket from the tree and made her smell of it, she flattened her ears against her head and shot under the porch again.
But lessons grow dim and temptation is freshly importunate. It was not two weeks before Jonathan was up another tree on the same errand, and when I considered the number of nests in our orchard, and the number of cats—none of them really our cats—on the place, I felt that the position of overruling [pg 069] Providence was almost more than we could undertake, if we hoped to do anything else.
* * * * *
These things—tinkering of latches and chairs, pump-mending, rescue work in the orchard and among the poultry—filled our evenings fairly full. Yet these are only samples, and not particularly representative samples either. They were the sort of things that happened oftenest, the common emergencies incidental to the life. But there were also the uncommon emergencies, each occurring seldom but each adding its own touch of variety to the tale of our evenings.
For instance, there was the time of the great drought, when Jonathan, coming in from a tour of the farm at dusk, said, “I’ve got to go up and dig out the spring-hole across the swamp. Everything else is dry, and the cattle are getting crazy.”
“Can I help?” I asked, not without regrets for our books and our evening—it was a black night, and I had had hopes.
“Yes. Come and hold the lantern.”