The same; now dead, among the stars a star.
What man or woman worth remembering but has loved at least one dog? Hamerton, in speaking of the one dog—the special pet and dear companion of every boy and many a girl, from Ulysses to Bismarck—observes that “the comparative shortness of the lives of dogs is the only imperfection in the relation between them and us. If they had lived to threescore and ten, man and dog might have travelled through life together; but as it is, we must have either a succession of affections, or else, when the first is buried in its early grave, live in a chill condition of dog-lessness.” I thank him for coining that compound word. Almost every one might, like Grace Greenwood and Gautier, write a History of my Pets, and make a most readable book. Bismarck honoured one of his dogs, Nero, with a formal funeral. The body was borne on the shoulders of eight workmen dressed in black to a grave in the park. He had been poisoned, and a large reward was offered for the discovery of the assassin. The prince, statesman, diplomatist, does not believe in dog-lessness, and gives to another hound, equally devoted, the same intense affection. “My dog—where is my dog?” are his first words on alighting from a railway, as Sultan must travel second class. He even mixes the food for his dogs with his own hands, believing it will make them love him the more.
Another Nero was the special companion of Mrs. Carlyle, a little white dog, who had for his playmate a black cat, whose name was Columbine, and Carlyle says that during breakfast, whenever the dining-room door was opened, Nero and Columbine would come waltzing into the room in the height of joy. He went with his mistress everywhere, led by a chain for fear of thieves. For eleven years he cheered her life at Craigenputtock, “the loneliest nook in Britain.”
Nero’s death was a tragical one. In October, 1859, while walking out with the maid one evening, a butcher’s cart driving furiously round a sharp corner ran over his throat. He was not killed on the spot, although his mistress says “he looked killed enough at first.” The poor fellow was put into a warm bath, wrapped up in flannels, and left to die. The morning found him better, however; he was able to wag his tail in response to the caresses of his mistress.
Little by little he recovered the use of himself, but it was ten days before he could bark.
He lived four months after this, docile, affectionate, loyal up to his last hour, but weak and full of pain. The doctor was obliged at last to give him prussic acid. They buried him at the top of the garden in Cheyne Row, and planted cowslips round his grave, and his loving mistress placed a stone tablet, with name and date, to mark the last resting place of her blessed dog.
“I could not have believed,” writes Carlyle in the Memorials, “my grief then and since would have been the twentieth part of what it was—nay, that the want of him would have been to me other than a riddance. Our last midnight walk together—for he insisted on trying to come—January 31st, is still painful to my thought. Little dim white speck of life, of love, fidelity, and feeling, girdled by the darkness of night eternal.”
Is not that a delightful revelation of tenderness in the heart of the grand old growler, biographer, critic, historian, essayist, prophet, whom most people feared? I like to read it again and again.
The selfish, cynical Horace Walpole sat up night after night with his dying Rosette. He wrote: “Poor Rosette has suffered exquisitely; you may believe I have too,” and honoured her with this epitaph:
Sweetest roses of the year