This pleased me, and I licked his nice, dark hands. Then we had a dandy supper, and I had a good long drink of fresh water—my favourite beverage. I don’t care much for milk. While Ellen washed the dishes, Robert Lee sat in one of the rocking-chairs and played on his banjo while he sang to her about “Mighty Lak a Rose,” and “I Want to Go to Tokio,” and “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.”
After a while, he put away his banjo, and we all went to bed.
I slept on the old coloured woman’s couch. She started me on a piece of carpet by the gas stove, but as soon as she was asleep, I sneaked up and lay beside her feet. I saw no earthly reason why I should not do so. I had licked my paws quite clean, and I had no fleas, and I loved a comfortable bed high up, and hated a draughty floor.
In the morning very early, for charwomen must work, while ladies sleep, my nice Ellen got up, roused her son who was sleeping the pig sleep of all healthy young males, and prepared a nice, smelly breakfast—bacon and warmed-over sausage, and two fried eggs, and hot rolls and perfectly scrumptious coffee with real cream from a bottle outside the window.
Rich people say that working people don’t live well. Poor people that have brains enough to work, can live well if they choose, and they mostly do choose. I think they have lots more fun than rich people. They don’t whine and snarl so much, and they laugh harder and oftener, and cry louder and longer.
Ellen would have been frightfully bored on Riverside Drive, or Fifth or Park Avenues. She was one of the happiest women I ever saw, and Robert Lee, her son, whistled all the time. He had a good mother, and a nice molasses shade of girl whose picture he carried in his heart pocket, and he had good wages and plenty to eat, and no enemies, and he didn’t drink, and he had no heavy social duties.
Well, Ellen had her three cups of coffee, and I had a perfectly stunning feed; then Robert Lee went to do his sidewalk posing in front of his hotel, and finally, about eight o’clock, we took a cross-town street and walked toward Riverside Drive.
I love interesting situations, and it nearly tickled me to death to imagine what was going to happen. Poor old Ellen was so pleased in what she called my pleasure in going home. Some dogs would have run away before they would have faced the lady who thought me the dog of a thief, but I trusted to luck and pressed on.
Ellen had too much sense to put a string on me. I jumped and frisked about her, and that young Boston bull’s collar swung and twisted about my neck. By the way, it was a very valuable collar, with fine imitation turquoises in it.
Finally we emerged upon the Drive. The Hudson was more glorious in the morning sunlight than it had been in the starlight of the night before.