"Molly has been too pale for several days, and has little or no appetite," she said, looking affectionately at me. "The change will do her good, and there is no other place where she enjoys a visit more than at your house. Molly! can't you thank Cousin Frank for taking the trouble to come for you?"
Strained by conflicting emotions, I fidgeted awkwardly about Cousin Frank's chair, pinching the hem of my apron into folds, and shifting from one foot to the other.
"I want to go dreadfully!" I got out at length, almost ready to cry. "But—Cousin Frank—wouldn't you like to look at Bay? He's an old hare that I am taming."
While speaking, I started for the door, and he came after me. My mother exclaimed, provoked, yet laughing, that I was "getting more ridiculous every day," but I knew my man, and did not stop.
Bay was throwing a particularly hard fit when we got to him. His cries had something humanlike in them that pierced ears and heart.
"My dear child!" uttered the shocked visitor. "How long has this been going on?"
Upon hearing that the poor thing had never seemed really well from the day he was hurt, and had been "going on like this for four days, hand-running," he was quite angry—for him.
"I wonder that your mother let you keep him when he was in this state," he said seriously; and, seeing the tears I could not drive back, he sat down on my chair and drew me up to him. "It would be better to kill the poor creature, at once, dear. He can never be better."
I begged him not to tell my mother about Bay's sickness. I had become very fond of him, and he was so sweet and patient—and tame,—and I just couldn't bear to have him killed. Whether he would have granted my petition or not was not to be tested. While I was speaking, Bay uttered a shrill scream, leaped up high in the air, and fell over on his back, dead.
We hurried on the funeral that I might go home with Cousin Frank that evening. I pulled up the tombstone from the head of Caspar Hauser's grave and made an epitaph on the other side for Bay. There might not be another slate broken in the family for months. At the present rate of mortality among my pensioners, it behooved me to be economical. I had not time to indite such an elaborate testimonial to the worth of the deceased as graced Caspar Hauser's last resting-place. Yet I thought the tribute not amiss, and the drop into poetry elated me and electrified my audience. The lines were engraved perpendicularly upon the slate to give the rhyme effective room:—