“The following spring I had seven dark-coloured ducklings brought up from the farm and put on the lawn, together with five very nice white ones, which, as they were about the same age as mine, I bought to go with them. I had the white ones wired in when they were first brought home till they should get accustomed to their quarters, and every day after luncheon I used to take some scraps out and feed them. This proceeding excited Whankey’s jealousy to the highest pitch, and she used to walk round the wire with her bristles up, and growling savagely. One Sunday morning before I started for church I opened the wire and left all the ducks to run about together, and Whankey was as usual in the drawing room with the window open. On my return a tragic tale was unfolded. The gardener had met Whankey carrying a dead white duckling in her mouth, and he had watched her go with it to the asparagus bed, lay it down, and proceed to dig a hole. The gardener picked up the duck and brought it into the house, and Whankey immediately went indoors and ensconced herself in my bedroom. I went to the lawn to see what had happened, and there found the seven dark ducklings all huddled together and looking very frightened, and not a white one to be seen. Further search showed that all the latter had been killed and buried in different parts of the asparagus bed, and there was no doubt but that Whankey was the culprit, not only in the matter of the ducklings, but in that of the cockerel the year before.”
A Sunday Morning Work
WHANKEY
The extraordinary thing about this performance was, as Miss Serrell points out, that the terrier picked out only those ducklings of which her mistress had taken special notice in order to reconcile them to their new home. She must have killed each of the detested rivals separately, and then carried the body a considerable distance from the front lawn to the middle of the kitchen garden, and there concealed the evidence of the crime. In fact, it was clear that Whankey had had an active morning’s work before her mistress returned from church, and that the little brain had not been idle was proved by the perfectly planned scheme of vengeance.
Whankey did not show any touching sorrow for her crime, and perhaps considered that the end of clearing rivals from her path justified the means she used. In fact, she could not be considered as a repentant sinner, though she never liked to hear her exploit alluded to. If any one said to her, “Whankey, where are the white ducks?” she “would always get up and walk away growling.”
The growls would seem to show an unrepentant frame of mind to the end. She wished the subject to be forgotten, but the cockerel and the ducklings were beyond the power of annoying her. The price we are content to pay for a great relief is sometimes a large one.
XII
“For know that in the soul