“I had still four babies on my hands, and as they were now all awake and making all the noise they knew how to make, I put them all in the clothes-basket together, so they could enjoy one another’s society. It wasn’t a bad plan, and I recommend it to any mother with a noisy pair of twins, as it is certain to reduce the noise by one-half. Two of my babies were so occupied with putting their fingers in the other babies’ eyes and in investigating their hair that they had no time to cry. I admit that the two who were undergoing investigation did their best to make a riot, but even then there was only half as much noise as there would have been had the other two joined the concert.
“I thought it so probable that the mother who had visited me was only the first of a procession of mothers, that I gave up the idea of going out to look for a nurse, and stayed at home to receive the mothers politely. It was not long before one presented herself. She was an Irishwoman and the only sensible one of the lot. When she saw that her baby was safe and contented and had a good grip on the hair of a black-eyed baby, she sat down and laughed, and said that she never saw anything so sweet before. According to her account, she lived about a mile from my house, and she was standing at her front door looking at the landscape, when the dog bounded in, caught up the baby out of the cradle, and carried it off. At first she thought the dog was the devil, but presently she remembered that the devil’s time was too much occupied with Irish affairs to permit him to steal babies in Iowa, so she followed the dog as rapidly as she could make her way through the snow. She tracked him by the prints of his paws until she came to my door, and instead of calling me a kidnapper and talking about the police, she was full of pity for me, and volunteered to stay and take care of the whole menagerie until the last of the babies should be called for and taken away.
“The remaining mothers arrived in the course of an hour. I locked myself in the top of the house and left the Irishwoman to explain things. As I afterward learned, the intelligent dog had knocked two women down in the street and stolen their babies out of their arms, and had also broken into two houses, in the last one of which he had bagged his brace of twins. All the mothers, except the Irishwoman, were as unreasonable as they could possibly be. They insisted that I deliberately trained dogs to steal babies, and they had no doubt that my object in stealing them was to vivisect them. As for the dog, they were convinced that he was mad and that their babies would be sure to die of hydrophobia. Two of the women brought their husbands with them, who asked to see me, explaining that they desired to blow my head off. The Irishwoman nobly lied to them, telling them that she had driven me out of the house with a club, and that I was on my way to Chicago and far out of reach. The mothers and their husbands went away at last, and as soon as it was dark I stole out of the back door and took the first train for St. Paul. I didn’t show myself in New Berlinopolisville for the next year.
“What became of the dog? Oh! I forgot to say that the Irishwoman promised to take care of him and to cure him of his passion for babies. I am sorry to say that she did not succeed. She kept him tied up for six weeks, but one day he broke loose and captured a baby out of a baby-wagon in the park. But the baby’s father happened to be with it, and he was one of the best pistol-shots in town, having been a judge of the Montana Supreme Court. He got the drop on the dog before the beast had gone ten feet away with the baby, and though they afterward had to pry the dog’s jaws open in order to get the baby loose, no harm was done to the latter. I settled all the lawsuits without letting them go to trial, although it cost me considerable and I finally judged it best to remove to another State.
“Now, I suppose that some one will be enough of an idiot to repeat this story with variations as a proof of the wonderful intelligence of the St. Bernard dog. If it is intelligence that leads a dog to steal other people’s babies and dump them on a respectable man, I’d like to see what idiocy would do for such a dog. No, sir! depend upon it, the stories about St. Bernard dogs are invented by the monks after stimulating their minds by reading the ‘Lives of the Saints’ and by going trout-fishing. Probably the monks have gradually brought themselves to believe most of the stories. They look like a credulous set of people, and I should rather like to try them with a good American political speech, full of campaign statistics, and see if they could believe it. I shouldn’t be in the least surprised if they could.”
A MATRIMONIAL ROMANCE.
“And by the way,” continued the Colonel, “a curious thing about this Josiah Wilson was that he was married for fifteen years and never had any wife whatever.”