JAGG, THE SKOOTAWAY GOAT
After the tragical deaths of Tom-Tom and Upsidaisi, my life was strangely lonely. No one who has not experienced it can realise the subtle, almost spiritual attachment which may exist between man and his kindred of the wild. The Squirrels barked at each other, but there was no bark for me except on the oak tree at my cabin door. The little Birds sang, but not for me. Whenever I approached a thicket where the woodland chorus was in rehearsal, trying to learn the Bird-calls which are printed in the books, there was a spontaneous silence which seemed to possess a positive rather than a negative quality.
I felt like a marked man. In my fevered fancy I could hear the wood creatures saying to one another: “There goes the man who lived with Little Upsidaisi. By the way, have you seen Upsidaisi lately? What a brute the man looks, to be sure! Come, let us skip, while we have the time.”
So it was that I seemed to be the centre of an ever-widening circle of departure. Feet pattered away from me in a continual diminuendo, dying at last into that mournful, unchanging silence which encompassed me like a blanket of gloom.
It is not my intention to depress the reader, but the scientific observer must make accurate records, and my mental state at the time may have been partially responsible for what followed.
Regularly, I took my walk of fourteen miles into town. At first I had contented myself with weekly visits to the post-office, but as the returned manuscripts augmented, I went every morning and took my simple breakfast at a restaurant. For some occult reason, I have never been able to make coffee even remotely resembling that customarily prepared by my immediate ancestor on the feminine side.
The long, business-like envelopes which I received every morning contributed largely to my local importance, and the gossip of the place buzzed eternally about my head. According to some, I was an insurance agent. Others admitted me to the bar without examination, and a certain keen observer, well up in the guileful ways of commerce, thought I had paid two dollars to get my name on somebody’s “list,” thereby being guaranteed “lots of mail.”
Fortunately, no hint of my true calling escaped, and the rejection blanks continued to accumulate. I have preserved these with the idea of incorporating them in a psychological treatise on The Gentle Art of Turning Down, which will be printed as soon as I get a publisher for the noble, epoch-making volume upon which I am at present engaged.
I had learned that editors were variable, and were not always what they seemed. A rejection was merely an indication of the man’s mood at the time he got my piece, and I have, more than once, sold the same thing to him later for a goodly sum. I offer no explanation of this, as my field is limited to animal, rather than human observations, and the Labour Union to which I belong is very strict in such matters. I may be permitted to add, however, that one editor, to whom I sent a mental fledgling for the second or third time, wrote me a personal letter in which he said that he was no more of a fool now than he was three months ago. I do not know what he could have meant by the statement, but I record it in the hope that someone else may.