Part 12

This was the Max of the poem, who “with downcast, reverent head” had looked upon “Kaiser, dead”--“Kaiser,” once the blithest, happiest of dogs, supposed at first to be pure dachshund, until at length with--

“The collie hair, the collie swing, The tail’s indomitable ring, The eye’s unrest-- The case was clear; a mongrel thing ‘Kai’ stood confest.”

All the same--

“Thine eye was bright, thy coat it shone; Thou hadst thine errands off and on; In joy thine last morn flew; anon, A fit! All’s over; And thou art gone where Geist hath gone, And Toss and Rover.”

It is the fashion of mortality to pass away--but that does not alter the sadness of it--of losing what we love. As surely as we have friends or pets, so surely shall we know the pain of loss--fortunate only if there has been between us such true love that the memory thereof abides. Such love there was between Mr. Edmund Yates and Nelly, the story of whose life he told me in the following letter of September, 1887:

“Your letter finds me mourning the loss of the one pet animal of my life. In the year 1878, having taken a country place, and being in want of an animal as companion, I went to the Dogs’ Home at Battersea, and on visiting the kennels, was at once struck with the piteous and earnest expression on the face of a female collie, looking up, with many others, through the wire netting; an expression which said, as plainly as possible, ‘Take me out of this, for Heaven’s sake, and I will be loving and true.’ I could learn nothing of her previous history, but I paid a sovereign for her, and took her away with me in a cab; and from that hour to the day of her death, just two months ago, Nelly, as I called her, was the light of my household, and won the admiration and love of all who saw her.

“Under kind treatment she developed into a very handsome dog, never large, but wonderfully graceful, leaping and bounding like a deer. Her back was a reddish-brown, her chest and paws beautifully white; she looked bright and intelligent, and her eyes had a certain wistful expression, which is well reproduced in the accompanying photograph. She was not particularly clever. She seemed to say, like one of Tennyson’s heroines:

“‘I cannot understand, I love.’

“She was always with me, and in places which I frequent, she was thoroughly well-known; she lay opposite me in the carriage, on the deck of my steam-launch, with her nose up in the air, sniffing the fresh breeze to windward. (‘See the kind-eyed old collie; on the deck, in the sunshine, she loves to recline,’ sang my friend Ashby-Sterry of her in one of his pretty Lazy Minstrel Lays.)

“She followed me in my long rides on horseback, over down and through wood, ranging far away on her own business, but ever and anon coming back to see how I was getting on. She lay at my feet in my library, and slept on a couch at the bottom of my bed. About eighteen months before her death, she developed signs of failing sight, and gradually grew totally blind. This blindness was the cause of an accident on which I do not care to dwell, but which necessitated her destruction; and on the twenty-seventh of July she passed away without a pang. She lies buried in the garden here, at the foot of a flag-staff, and on her prettily turfed grave is the following inscription:

HERE LIES NELLY A COLLIE DOG; FOR NINE YEARS A MUCH LOVED FRIEND, GENTLE, AFFECTIONATE, AND TRUE. DIED JULY 27TH, 1887. E. Y., L. K. Y., A. M. B., W. W.

“This is the history of Nelly, whose memory is so dear to me that I will never have another pet.”

Vorbei! vorbei--past and gone!--says Andersen in telling the fir-tree’s story. It is also vorbei! with these pets--with Mouche and Dash and Kaiser, with Geist and Nelly and Flush.

IV.

“THE UPPER TEN.”

IV.

“THE UPPER TEN.”

Biography is so genial nowadays, and full of easy gossip, that we cannot help wondering a little at her former stiffness. Nothing is below her notice now, but the personalia of earlier times slip into her pages more by accident than design. This, no doubt, is the reason why she referred so seldom or so briefly to the pet animals of royalty. There was a divinity in monarchs then, and she treated them with such ceremonious respect that if we had only her account to look to, we should know but little of their real selves.

Fortunately for us, letters have been written in every age, and countless private journals. From these sources come the anecdotes, the jests, the bits of gossip which recall the past more vividly, and make these old rulers seem life-like even yet. In this way many a simple, natural trait has been preserved to relieve the court background of formality and grandeur; many a little incident is told that proves our common blood. Kings and queens loved and hoped, or grieved and feared, even as ourselves who wear no crowns; and while the soft afterglow of years falls on royalty surrounded by its pets, we realize anew how one touch of nature can make the whole world kin.

About the beginning of the seventeenth century, there might have been seen in India at the magnificent court of Jehangir, a favorite of unusual intelligence and size, whose story has come down to us in memoirs written by the Emperor himself. It reads like a page from the Arabian Nights.

“Among my brother’s elephants,” he says, “was one of which I could not but express the highest admiration, and to which I gave the name of Indraging (the elephant of India). It was of a size I never beheld before--such as to get upon his back required a ladder of fourteen steps. It was of a disposition so gentle and tractable that under the most furious incitements, if an infant then unwarily threw itself in its way, it would lay hold of it with its trunk, and place it out of danger with the utmost tenderness and care. The animal was at the same time of such unparalleled speed and activity that the fleetest horse was not able to keep up with it; and such was its courage that it would attack with perfect readiness a hundred of the fiercest of its kind.

“Such in other respects, although it may appear in some degree tedious to dwell upon the subject, were the qualities of this noble and intelligent quadruped, that I assigned a band of music to attend upon it; and it was always preceded by a company of forty spearsmen. It had for its beverage every morning a Hindostany maun (twenty-eight pounds) of liquor; and every morning and evening there were boiled for its meal four mauns of rice, and two mauns of beef or mutton, with one maun of oil or clarified butter. From among all the others this same elephant was selected for my morning rides, and for this purpose there was always upon its back a howdah of solid gold. Four mauns of gold were moreover wrought into rings, chains, and other ornaments for its neck, breast and legs; and lastly, its body was painted all over every day with the dust of sandal-wood.”

There is something quite captivating in the idea of all this oriental pomp enshrining the favorite of an emperor--in its careful tendance, its perfumes, jewels and musicians--the latter, in particular, being an attention as delicate as unusual.

One would like to know its after-history--whether it survived so magnificent a patron, and whether, in that case, its splendor remained undiminished to the end. But the story of the Elephant of India stops with Jehangir.

About the same time that this liberal-minded monarch ascended the throne of the East, there died in Genoa another imperial favorite--the hound Roldarno, which had belonged to Charles V., and was by him given to Andrea Doria. Such at least is the common version; but it is also stated that Roldarno belonged to a later Doria, and did not die until nine years after the old Admiral was in his grave. In either case, he was a notable dog, and received the final honor of interment at the foot of a statue of Jupiter--to the end “that Roldarno still might guard a king.” His life-size portrait may be seen in the Doria palace.

This same Emperor had an almost feminine liking for birds and flowers; and he who would not lift a finger to keep his heretic subjects from the flames, once ordered his tent to be left standing in the camp, otherwise dismantled, simply because a swallow had nested in its folds.

“And it stood there all alone, Loosely flapping, torn and tattered, Till the brood was fledged and flown, Singing o’er those walls of stone That the cannon-shot had shattered.”

In the last years of his life at Yuste, he made great pets of a cat and parrot. After his death, they were transferred to his daughter, the Princess Juana, who with true Spanish courtesy, dispatched a litter for them in charge of a faithful servant. In due time they reached Valladolid, well and happy, having traveled together a number of days without one single recorded peck or scratch.