By favour of whatever god
Decides the destiny of fishes;
And that were vengeance passing sweet—
Your captor on your counterfeit!
DAISY.
He was always called Daisy. We hated the name, but the christening "just happened" with the suddenness of influenza or an earthquake. Percy was the culprit, for he knocked all our pre-arranged plans for a name on the head by his passion for what he calls "apt quotation." When he (Daisy) emerged from his basket we saw that, like NELSON, he was blind of an eye. Percy, immediately inspired, quoted from WORDSWORTH'S Ode to the Daisy, "A little Cyclops with one eye"—and the result was inevitable. Daisy resented the name from the first, for at the very font, so to speak, he drew blood from us both, and then, utterly indifferent to our feelings, settled himself on the top of an empty beer barrel and there performed his evening ablutions.
It was a curious coincidence that made him select a beer barrel, for thereby hung a tragic tale. He and his twin-brother had been adopted from infancy by the Sergeants' Mess and had lived in peace and plenty—in fact in too much plenty, for I regret to say that Daisy's brother died of drink from having formed the discreditable habit of emptying all the dregs of the Sergeants' beer mugs into his own inside. However, he was granted military obsequies, which were so successfully performed that an account of them found its way into one of the daily papers. This so delighted the amateur undertakers that Daisy's brother was at once exhumed and re-buried with further pomp and circumstance. Daisy meanwhile, feeling himself of less consequence than the departed hero, began to mope; so to save life and reason he was sent to us "to cheer and cherish," as the Sergeants put it.
An egotistical irascible bachelor seagull; yet his vices, and he was made up of them, became virtues in our eyes.