His pet cat, though as a kitten indifferent to music, grew to like it, and regularly led the way to the piano when the business of the tea-table was done. Here she took post on a chair, and listened gravely during the whole performance. When it ceased, and the instrument was closed, she would return to the rug, or to his knee, and sleep out the rest of the evening.
A Feline Paderewski.
Not so, however, if the piano was left open; in that case, puss leaped on the keys and pawed a performance of her own, in which she showed an extreme partiality for the treble notes, and something like alarm at the big bass ones, when she happened to give them an extra vigorous kick with her heels. In fact, a rousing discord would frighten her off the keys, but she would return again and soothe her feelings by a gentle pattering among the upper notes.
These exploits she repeated whenever the piano was left open, and whether she had auditors or not; so that it became necessary to close the instrument or exclude the cat from the room in order to insure a moment’s quietness. If by any chance her master spent the evening from home, puss showed her disappointment and dissatisfaction by restlessness and ill-temper.
Twenty-five years ago the writer was one of a joint-stock proprietary who owned a boat on an inland river, winding through a retired and picturesque tract of country. There were seven of us, all being either singers or players of instruments; and in this boat it was our custom to spend an occasional leisure hour in musical voyagings up and down the river. To many an old English melody on these occasions did the moss-covered rocks and precipitous banks return harmonious echoes.
A Dancing Cow.
We made strange acquaintances on those long voyages, up a stream navigated by no other keel than ours, and, among other natural curiosities, we fell in with a musical cow. This creature, a small, cream-colored specimen of the Alderney breed, suckled her calf, along with a dozen other vaccine mothers, in a meadow which sloped down to the river’s brink.
Whenever we turned the bend of the river, “with our voices in tune as the oars kept time,” and the meadow came in sight, there we were sure to see the white cow, standing up to the shoulders in the water, whither she had advanced to meet us, her neck stretched out and her dripping nose turned toward the boat.
As we skirted the meadow, she kept pace with us on the bank, testifying her delight by antics of which no cow in her senses would have been thought capable. She would leap, skip, roll on her back, rear on her hind legs, and then hurl them aloft in the air like a kicking horse—now rushing into the water to look at us nearer, now frisking off like a kitten at play.
When she came to the meadow-fence, she dashed through it furiously into the next field, and so on through the next fence, and the next after that. The fourth being railed, she would turn it by wading the river, and was only prevented from following us farther by a steep, precipitous bank which stopped her progress.