Gala-Days [110]
to lose him, but I was sure he would lose himself,--a tender little dilettante, served a prince all the days of his life, never having to lift a finger to help himself, or knowing a want unsatisfied. Now, thrown suddenly upon his own resources, homeless, friendless, forlorn, how could ever make his fortune in this bleak New England, for all he has, according to Cuvier, more brains in his head in proportion to his size than any other created being? I saw him already in midsummer, drenched with cold rains, chilled and perishing; but sharper eyes than mine had marked his flight, and a pair of swift hands plunged after him into the long grass that tangled his wings and kept him back from headlong destruction. Amicable relations between Cheri and the cat are on a most precarious footing. The cat was established in the house before Cheri came,--a lovely, frolicsome kitten, that sat in my lap, purred in my face, rubbed her nose against my book, and grew up, to my horror, out of all possibility of caresses, into a great, ugly, fierce, fighting animal, that comes into the house drenched and dripping from the mud-puddle in which she has been rolling in a deadly struggle with every Tom Hyer and Bill Sayers of the cat kind that make night hideous through the village. This cat seems to be possessed with a devil every time she looks at Cheri. Her green eyes bulge out of her head, her whole feline soul rushes into them, and glares with a hot, greeny-yellow fire and fury of unquenchable desire. One evening I had put the cage on a chair, and was quietly reading in the room below, when a great slam and bang startled the house. "The bird!" shrieked a voice, mine or another's. I rushed upstairs. The moonlight shone in, revealing the cage upturned on the floor, the water running, the seeds scattered about, and a feather here and there. The cat had managed to elude observation and glide in, and she now managed to elude observation and glide out. Cheri was alive, but his enemy had attacked him in the flank, and turned his left wing, which was pretty much gone, according to all appearances. He could not mount his perch, and for three days, crouching on the floor of his cage, life seemed to have lost its charm. His spirits drooped, his appetite failed, and his song was hushed. Then his feathers grew out again, his spirit returned to him with his appetite, and he hopped about as good as new. To think that cat should have been able to thrust her villanous claw in far enough to clutch a handful of feathers of him before she upset the cage! I have heard that canaries sometimes die of fright. If so, I think Cheri would have been justified in doing it. To have a great overgrown monster, with burning globes of eyes as big as your head and claws as sharp as daggers, come glaring on you in the darkness, overturn your house, and grab half your side with one huge paw, is a thing well calculated to alarm a person of delicate organization.
Then I said to myself, this cat thinks she has struck a placer, and a hundred to one she will be driving her pick in here again directly. So I removed the cage immediately, and set it on a high bureau, with a "whisking-stick" close by it. Sure enough I was awakened the next morning before day by a prolonged and mournful "maeouw" of disappointment from the old dragon at not finding the prey where she had expected. Before she had time to push her researches to success, she and I and the stick were not letting the grass grow under our feet on the stairs. Long after, when the fright and flurry had been forgotten, the cage was again left in a rocking-chair in the upper front entry, where I had been sitting in sunshine all the afternoon with Cheri, who thinks me, though far inferior to a robin or a finch, still better than no company at all. In the course of the evening I happened to open the lower entry door, when the cat suddenly appeared on the lower stair. I should have supposed she had come from the sitting-room with me, but for a certain elaborate and enforced nonchalance in her demeanor, a jaunty
Then I said to myself, this cat thinks she has struck a placer, and a hundred to one she will be driving her pick in here again directly. So I removed the cage immediately, and set it on a high bureau, with a "whisking-stick" close by it. Sure enough I was awakened the next morning before day by a prolonged and mournful "maeouw" of disappointment from the old dragon at not finding the prey where she had expected. Before she had time to push her researches to success, she and I and the stick were not letting the grass grow under our feet on the stairs. Long after, when the fright and flurry had been forgotten, the cage was again left in a rocking-chair in the upper front entry, where I had been sitting in sunshine all the afternoon with Cheri, who thinks me, though far inferior to a robin or a finch, still better than no company at all. In the course of the evening I happened to open the lower entry door, when the cat suddenly appeared on the lower stair. I should have supposed she had come from the sitting-room with me, but for a certain elaborate and enforced nonchalance in her demeanor, a jaunty