Live Toys; Or, Anecdotes of Our Four-Legged and Other Pets

by Emma Davenport

I mentioned, that Tawney used to enrage the people in the cottages by trying to worry their cats. On one of these occasions, when he had made a dreadful confusion at the door of a cottage containing children, upsetting a tub of soap-suds, dirtying the clean sanded floor, and frightening an old woman nearly out of her wits, by his reckless endeavour to seize on the cat; a man had come angrily out of the cottage, and coming close up to the carriage, declared with a clenched fist, and a furious countenance, that if Tawney ever approached his door again, he would kill him. Papa, who happened to be with us, said that if he would give Tawney a good beating, it would punish the dog without punishing us; and as he was a great favourite, he begged that he would not think of killing him. Then we drove on, leaving the man standing sulkily in the road.

Whether Tawney had gone alone to this cottage for the purpose of worrying the cat, or whether the man had taken his revenge for the first offence, or whether he had done any thing in the matter, we shall never know; but we could not help suspecting him when the following sad affair happened.

It was a very sultry day, too much so to run or to do anything but lie on the grass, which we did during the whole morning. Papa sat reading on a bench placed in the shady side of the house, and we were on the grass beside him; Tawney lay roasting in the sun, and, now and then, panting with heat, came to us in the shade, or even went into the dining-room window and flung himself down under the table; some steps led into the garden from the window, and as the window-sill was not level with the dining-room floor, but raised about two feet above it, we had a stool or sort of step inside the window, as well as outside; Tawney generally sprang through, without troubling himself about the steps.

Soon after Tawney had entered the house, apparently for the purpose of cooling himself, we heard a tumble, then another, and I got up to see what he was doing. "Why Papa," I cried, "what can be the matter with Tawney, he is trying to jump out of the window and cannot reach the sill, and falls back again." Papa came to see, and again the dog made an ineffectual spring at the low window-sill. Papa lifted him out into the garden, saying he supposed he had half blinded himself with lying so long in the hot sunshine. But we continued to watch him, and presently we saw his limbs twitching in a sort of fit, and he ran wildly about us. Papa called to the gardener, and they took him into the stable, forbidding us to approach him, as they feared he was going mad; they dashed water over him as he lay exhausted on the straw in the stable; but soon the fits became more and more violent, and our poor dog in a few hours was dead.

A man that examined him by Papa's desire, said there was no doubt that he had been poisoned by strychnine. He might have picked up something so poisoned while running in the roads, or it might have been purposely done by the angry man to whom I alluded. We never found out the manner in which it had been administered, and could only regret most heartily the loss of our dear playfellow. We had not another dog for a very long time, and never shall love one so well as Tawney.

PUFFER, THE PIGEON.

What pretty things are pigeons, how happy and nice they look sitting on the house-top, and walking up and down the sloping roof with their pretty pink feet and slender legs; and then how they flutter up into the air, making circles round the house, and now and then darting off on a straight flight across the fields. Soon after we came to live at our country house, my sister had a present of a pair of fantail pigeons, quite white. They were beauties, not the slightest speck of any colour was on their feathers; and when they walked about with their tails spread out in a fan, and their necks pulled up so proudly, we thought them the prettiest creatures we had ever seen. Our Papa allowed us to have a nice place made for them in the roof of the stables, with some holes for them to go in at, and a board before the holes for them to alight on; inside there were some niches for nests, and as the fantails were quite young, we soon ventured to put them in there. At first we spread a net over their holes, so that they could only walk about on the board outside; and when we thought they knew the look of the place well, we let them have their entire liberty, and they never left us.

Next we obtained a pair of tumblers, these were small dumpy little birds, of a burnished sort of copper colour, and such queer short little bills; when they were flying, they turned head over heels in the air, without in the least interrupting their flight. Then we had some capuchins, they were very curious-looking creatures, white and pale reddish brown, with a sort of a frill sticking up round their necks, and the back of their heads. We called them our Queen Elizabeths, for their ruffs were much more like her's than like a monk's hood, from which resemblance they are named. Besides these, we had several common pigeons, some pretty bluish and white. We fed them regularly in the yard, and when they saw us run out of the house, with our wooden bowl full of grain, they came fluttering down and took it out of our hands, and strutted about close to us so tamely and nicely; and then they would whirl up again in the air.

We lived quite close to a railway station, and at one time of the autumn, a great number of sacks of grain were brought there for carriage to distant parts of the country; for the corn fields were very numerous about us. In the process of unloading these sacks from the carts, and again packing them on the railway trucks, a quantity of corn was spilt about, and our pigeons were not slow to find this out; we noticed they were constantly flying over into the station-yards; and sometimes when we went to feed them in the morning, they did not come for our breakfast at all, having already made a great meal at the station. There was an old pigeon-house in the roof of the luggage store, which formed part of the station buildings; and our ungrateful pigeons actually went and built some of their nests in this pigeon house in preference to our own. At least, they laid their eggs there; as for building a nest they never did, they trod an untidy sort of hollow in the straw and wool we placed for them, and there laid their eggs.