“Love, now a universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing,
One moment now may give us more
Than fifty years of reason;
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.”
Wordsworth.
It was on a lovely morning early in the month of June that—after many trial trips here and there across country—we started on our long and romantic tour, away to the distant north.
Come weal or woe, we determined never to turn our horses’ heads southwards until we had reached and crossed the Grampian mountains.
All the village turned out to see us start—the older folks shouting us a friendly farewell, the children waving their arms in the air and cheering.
But in an hour’s time we were away in the lonesome woods, and when we stopped on a piece of moorland to eat our first real gipsy lunch, there was not a sound to be heard anywhere except the bleat of sheep, and the singing of the joyous birds in the adjoining copse.
A blue June sky was above us, June butterflies floated in the soft June air, June sunshine glittered in the quivering beech-tree leaves, June wild flowers were everywhere, and the joy of June was in all our hearts. I had never seen Frank look so buoyant and young as he did now, despite those tell-tale hairs of silver in his brown beard. Some of the roses of June seemed to have settled in Maggie May’s cheeks already, my wife looked calmly happy, and wee Ida madly merry, while Hurricane Bob rolled lazily on his back and pulled up and threw to the winds great tufts of verdant moss.
Ida was Frank’s coupé companion. His caravan came behind ours, and sure enough these two gipsies had plenty to say, and they saw plenty to laugh at.
It is time to tell the reader about one little wanderer that has not been mentioned before—Mysie, the caravan cat. We really had intended leaving Miss Mysie at home in charge of the old cook, but Miss Mysie did not mean to be left. She had watched with the most motherly interest all our preparations for the tour, and at the very last moment in she jumped and took possession of a corner of the caravan sofa, commencing forthwith to sing herself to sleep.
And there she was now, while we sat on the greensward at lunch, walking round big Bob, and rubbing her shoulders against his head, as happy as a feline queen.
For believe me, dear reader, cats are very much what you make them. I have made these animals a study, and found that the old ideas about them which naturalists possessed, and the conclusions they so ungenerously jumped at, are all wrong. I do assure you—and you can easily prove it for yourself—that if you use a cat well, feed her regularly and treat her as the rational being it undoubtedly is, you will find that pussy is not a thief, that she is fonder far of persons than places, that she is true and faithful, loving and good.