Half an hour after, as she was talking very busily, Bobbin came running into the room and began to walk round her, pull at her dress with his paw, go to the door, come back, rub against her, look up at her with great asking eyes, and at last mewed so impatiently that the neighbor said, "What upon earth ails that cretur? Seems as though he wanted suthin real bad."
"Oh! I guess he wants to get up into Polypod's room," said Nelly; "he sets by her dreadfully; but I was real sure I left him on to the foot of her bed, and I know I shet the door."
"Mebbe you'd better let him go up," suggested the visitor, who found Bobbin's importunity rather distracting to a very important conversation he wanted to begin.
So Nelly opened the door, and Bobbin rushed up the front stairs, and began to mew loudly at the top.
"I did shut the door, certain sure," laughed Nelly, going up to open it, and turning quite pale at the smell of fire, and then at the sight of Polypod calmly asleep in the bed, though the end of one pillow and the dimity curtain next the light stand were blazing and smoking away with a good-will.
Polypod might have burned or smothered to death but that Nelly had left the window over the shed roof open a little way when she went down, the night was so unusually warm; and probably Bobbin, seeing something wrong, had gone out here, jumped off the shed roof, and, making his way into the front door, gone to the first person he found for help. Now this is a true story, or I shouldn't dare to tell it. And thanks to Bobbin, and the visitor, who came tearing up when Nelly screamed, "Oh, George!" and pulled down the curtain very quickly, and stamped on it, there was no great harm done; for Polly's dose of skull-cap tea kept her quiet even when she awoke with the noise.
But nobody ever saw a cat so admired and well treated as Bobbin was after that. Nothing in the Dyer house was too good for him; and when, that same winter, he was chased by a dog of the tin peddler's, and fell into the well, from which he was fished out next day dead and dripping, Polypod's heart was broken. It was small comfort that Jinky dug a neat little grave under the Bell pear-tree, and put up a shingle head-stone, with the tender inscription:
"Here lies Bobbin,
Pretty as a robin,
Smart as a whip.
Why did he slip,
Sad to tell,
And get drowned in the well?"
This was all good, as far as it went, but Polypod cried harder and harder. At last she went to mother.
"Muvver," she piteously sobbed, "ca-can't I have a b-black bonnet to w-w-wear to meetin'?"