XXXVIII
PETS
My suggestive friend has taken to postcards, and his style, never diffuse, has become as curt as that of Mr. Alfred Jingle. "Why not Pets?" he writes; and the suggestion gives pause.
When Mrs. Topham-Sawyer accepted the invitation to the Little Dinner at Timmins's, she concluded her letter to Rosa Timmins: "With a hundred kisses to your dear little pet." She said pet, we are told, "because she did not know whether Rosa's child was a girl or a boy; and Mrs. Timmins was very much pleased with the kind and gracious nature of the reply to her invitation." My mind misgave me that my friend might be using the word pet in the same sense as Mrs. Topham-Sawyer, and inviting me to a discussion of the Crêche or the Nursery. As my views of childhood are formed on those of Herod and Solomon, I hastened to decline so unsuitable a task, whereupon my friend, for all reply, sent me the following excerpt from an evening paper:—
"The Westminster Cat Exhibition, which will be held in the Royal Horticultural Society's Hall, Vincent Square, Westminster, on January 10 and 11, will afford an opportunity to all who love the domestic cat to aid in improving its lot through the agency of Our Dumb Friends' League, which it is desired to benefit, not only by their presence on the occasion, but by contributing suitable specimens to the 'Gift Class' which will form part of the show, and be offered for sale in aid of the League during the time the exhibition is open. Children will be invited, for the first time, to enter into the competition with their pets for suitable prizes, and thus, it is hoped, increase their interest in and affection for domestic pets."
Here I felt myself on more familiar ground. For I, too, have been young. I have trafficked in squirrels and guinea-pigs, have invested my all in an Angora rabbit, and have undergone discipline for bringing a dormouse into school. These are, indeed, among the childish things which I put away when I became a Fifth Form boy; but their memory is sweet—sweeter, indeed, than was their actual presence. For the Cat, with which my friend seems chiefly to concern himself, I have never felt, or even professed, any warm regard. I leave her to Dick Whittington and Shakespeare, who did so much to popularize her; to Gray and Matthew Arnold and "C. S. C.," who have drawn her more sinister traits. Gray remarks, with reference to "the pensive Selima" and her hopeless struggles in the tub of goldfish, that "a favourite has no friend." Archbishop Benson rendered the line
"Delicias dominæ cetera turba fugit."
I join the unfriendly throng, and pass to other themes.