Queer little people

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

After a while she grew accustomed to her little travelling carriage, and resigned herself quietly to go to sleep in it; and so we got her from Paris to Kent, where we stopped a few days to visit some friends in a lovely country place called Swaylands.

Here we had presented to us another pet, that was ever after the chosen companion and fast friend of Florence. He was a little Skye terrier, of the color of a Maltese cat, covered all over with fine, long, silky hair, which hung down so evenly, that it was difficult at the first glance to say which was his head and which his tail. But at the head end there gleamed out a pair of great, soft, speaking eyes, that formed the only beauty of the creature; and very beautiful they were, in their soft, beseeching lovingness.

Poor Rag had the tenderest heart that ever was hid in a bundle of hair; he was fidelity and devotion itself, and used to lie at our feet in the railroad carriages as still as a gray sheep-skin, only too happy to be there on any terms. It would be too long to tell our travelling adventures in England; suffice it to say, that at last we went on board the Africa to come home, with our two pets, which had to be handed over to the butcher, and slept on quarters of mutton and sides of beef, till they smelt of tallow and grew fat in a most vulgar way.

At last both of them were safely installed in the brown stone cottage in Andover, and Rag was presented to a young lady to whom he had been sent as a gift from England, and to whom he attached himself with the most faithful devotion.

Both dogs insisted on having their part of the daily walks and drives of their young mistresses; and, when they observed them putting on their hats, would run, and bark, and leap, and make as much noise as a family of children clamoring for a ride.

After a few months, Florence had three or four little puppies. Very puny little things they were; and a fierce, nervous little mother she made. Her eyes looked blue as burnished steel, and if anybody only set foot in the room where her basket was, her hair would bristle, and she would bark so fiercely as to be quite alarming. For all that, her little ones proved quite a failure, for they were all stone-blind. In vain we waited and hoped and watched for nine days, and long after; the eyes were glazed and dim, and one by one they died. The last two seemed to promise to survive, and were familiarly known in the family circle by the names of Milton and Beethoven.

But the fatigues of nursing exhausted the delicate constitution of poor Florence, and she lay all one day in spasms. It became evident that a tranquil passage must be secured for Milton and Beethoven to the land of shades, or their little mother would go there herself; and accordingly they vanished from this life.

As to poor Flo, the young medical student in the family took her into a water-cure course of treatment, wrapping her in a wet napkin first, and then in his scarlet flannel dressing-gown, and keeping a wet cloth with iced water round her head. She looked out of her wrappings, patient and pitiful, like a very small old African female, in a very serious state of mind. To the glory of the water-cure, however, this course in one day so cured her, that she was frisking about the next, happy as if nothing had happened.

She had, however, a slight attack of the spasms, which caused her to run frantically and cry to have the hall-door opened; and when it was opened, she scampered up in all haste into the chamber of her medical friend, and, not finding him there, jumped upon his bed, and began with her teeth and paws to get around her the scarlet dressing-gown in which she had found relief before. So she was again packed in wet napkins, and after that never had another attack.