“Oh, Tom, here is poor Chammy. I’m sure he is cold. Let us take him and nurse him by the fire a little.”
And Lizzie might roll him in a Shetland-wool shawl, and sit down before the blaze to warm him, shawl and all, being very much astonished, perhaps, when she opened the shawl to have a peep, to find no Chammy there at all.
“Oh, Tom! Tom!” she would say, looking half afraid, “I’m sure I had Chammy in my hands, and I’m sure I rolled him up; and now, why, he is clean gone!”
Or the cockatoo might see him, if Uncle Ben were there, and raise a terrible alarm, shrieking and crying, “Scray! Scray! Scray!” till all the prismatic crystals in the old-fashioned chandelier jingled to the sound.
Or the Colonel himself might find him.
“Oh, you’re on the hop, are you?” the Colonel would say. “Now you just come back to your perch by the ingle-nook.”
And he would lift him by the crest that was over his head and carry him back to the branch.
Chammy was a good-tempered kind of a chameleon at most times, though he could bite a little, and give a good pinch too if he saw any occasion; but there was nothing in the world made him more indignant than being lifted up by the crest.
It was a handy way of lifting him certainly, but Chammy used to get pea-green with anger when you did so, and his little nimble eyes would look directly back at you; or, I should rather say, one of them would, for very seldom indeed did he send them both to duty at the same time.
“Put me down at once, sir,” he would say, or seem to say, “this is an indignity I do not feel called upon tamely to submit to. You would not dare to lift a crocodile of the Nile thus. Yet I, too, belong to the ancient family of the Saurians, and I bid you beware.”