Laurence Hutton

“ Beckwith considers Roy one of the best models he ever had. Roy does not have to be posed; he poses himself, willingly and patiently, [p 80]
so long as he can pose himself very close to his master; and he always places his front legs, which he knows to be his strong point, in the immediate foreground. He tries very hard to look pleasant, as if he saw a chipmunk at the foot of a tree, or as if he thought Mr. Beckwith was squeezing little worms of white paint out of little tubes just for his amusement. And if he really does see a chipmunk on a stump, he rushes off to bark at the chipmunk ”

“ He was The Boy’s, and The Boy was his, so long as he lived, ten happy years for both of them.
Without Punch’s phenomenal intelligence, Mop had many of Punch’s ways, and all of Punch’s trust and affection; and, like Punch, he was never so superlatively happy as when he was roughly mauled and pulled about by his tail. When by chance he was shut out in the back-yard, he knocked, with his tail, on the door; he squirmed his way into the heart of Mary Cook in the first ten minutes, and in half an hour he was on terms of the most affectionate friendship with Punch’s cat. ”

“ It was Mr. “Josh Billings” who said that in the whole history of the world there is but one thing that money cannot buy, to wit: the wag of a dog’s tail. And it was Professor John C. Van Dyke who declared the other day, in reviewing the artistic career of Landseer, that he made his dogs too human. It was the Great Creator himself who made dogs too human—so human that sometimes they put humanity to shame.
The Boy has been the friend and confidant of Four Dogs who have helped to humanize him for a quarter of a century and more, and who have souls to be saved, he is sure. ”

“ Castle was to The Boy an awful horror, of whom he always dreamed when his dreams were particularly bad. As he looks back upon his boyhood, with its frequent toothache and its long hours in the dentists’ chairs, The Boy sometimes thinks that if he had his life to live over again, and could not go through it without teeth, he would prefer not to be born at all!
It has rather amused The Boy, in his middle age, to learn of the impressions he made upon Red Hook in his extreme youth. Bob, as has been shown, associates him with a little cart, and with a good deal of the concord of sweet sounds. ”

“ This kitchen was a favorite playground of The Boy, and about that kitchen-table centre many of the happiest of his early reminiscences. Ann Hughes, the cook, was very good to The Boy. She told him stories, and taught him riddles, all about a certain “Miss Netticoat,” who wore a white petticoat, and who had a red nose, and about whom there still lingers a queer, contradictory legend to the effect that “the longer she stands the shorter she grows.” The Boy always felt that, on account of her nose, there was a peculiar bond of sympathy between little Miss Netticoat and himself. ”

“ And the man who would send his dog to the Dog Show, would send his wife to a Wife Show, and permit his baby to be exhibited, in public, for a blue ribbon or a certificate—at an admission-fee of fifty cents a head!
Mop’s successor answers to the name of Roy—when he answers to anything at all. He is young, very wilful, and a little hard of hearing, of which latter affliction he makes the most. He always understands when he is invited to go out. He is stone-deaf, invariably, when he is told to come back. But he is full of affection, and he has a keen sense of humor. ”

“ There is little medium about Roy. He is very good when he is good, and he is very horrid indeed when he is bad. He is a strange admixture of absolute devotion and of utter inconstancy. Nothing will entice him away from John on one day, neither threats nor persuasion. The next day he will cut John dead in the road, with no sign of recognition. He sees John, and he goes slowly and deliberately out of his way to pass John by, without a look or a sniff. He comes up-stairs every morning when his master’s shaving-water is produced. He watches intently the entire course of his master’s toilet ”

“ A long siege with a certain bicuspid had left The Boy, one early spring day, with a broken spirit and a swollen face. The father was going, that morning, to attend the funeral of his old friend, Dr. McPherson, and, before he left the house, he asked The Boy what should be brought back to him as a solace. Without hesitation, a brick of maple sugar was demanded—a very strange request, certainly, from a person in that peculiar condition of invalidism, and one which appealed strongly to the father’s own sense of the ridiculous. ”

“ JOE STUART
Barrytown is the river port of Red Hook—a charming Dutchess County hamlet in which The Boy spent the first summer of his life, and in which he spent the better part of every succeeding summer for a quarter of a century; and he sometimes goes there yet, although many of the names he knows were carved, in the long-agoes, on the tomb. He always went up and down, in those days, on the Mayflower, the real boat of that name, which was hardly more [p 45]
real to him than was the trundle-bed of his vivid, nightly imagination. ”

“ The Boy’s father was a scholar, and a ripe and good one. Self-made and self-taught, he began the serious struggle of life when he was merely a boy himself; and reading, and writing, and spelling, and languages, and mathematics came to him by nature. He acquired by slow degrees a fine library, and out of it a vast amount of information. He never bought a book that he did not read, and he never read a book unless he considered it worth buying and worth keeping. ”

“ He fights all the dogs in Tannersville; he fights the Drislers’ Gyp almost every time he meets him; he fights the Beckwiths’ Blennie only when either one of them trespasses on the domestic porch of the other (Blennie, who is very pretty, looks like old portraits of Mrs. Browning, with the curls hanging on each side of the face) ; and Roy never fights Laddie Pruyn nor Jack Ropes at all. Jack Ropes is the hero whom he worships, the beau ideal to him of everything a dog should be. He follows Jack in all respects; and he pays Jack the sincere flattery of imitation. ”

“ New Year’s Day was not the shortest day of the year, by any means, but it was absolutely necessary to return the Somebody’s call, no matter how late the hour, or how tired the victims of the social law. And it bored the ladies of the Somebody household as much as it bored the father and The Boy. ”

“ And then, before his master is ready to start, Roy goes off to breakfast, alone—at the Williamsons’! He will torment his master sometimes for hours to be taken out to walk; he will interrupt his master’s work, disturb his master’s afternoon nap, and refuse all invitations to run away for a walk on his own account. And the moment he and his master have started, he will join the first absolute stranger he meets, and walk off with that stranger in the opposite direction, and in the most confidential manner possible! ”

“ Punch died very suddenly; poisoned, it is supposed, by somebody whom he never injured. He never injured a living soul! And when Mary Cook dug a hole, by the side of Whiskie’s grave, one raw afternoon, and put Punch into it, his master is not ashamed to confess that he shut himself up in his room, threw himself onto the bed, and cried as he has not cried since they took his mother away from him.
Mop was the third of the quartet of dogs, and he came into the household like the Quality of Mercy. ”

“ The piano to The Boy has been the most offensive of instruments ever since. And when his mother’s old piano, graceful in form, and with curved legs which are still greatly admired, lost its tone, and was transformed into a sideboard, he felt, for the first time, that music had charms. ”

“ Johnny Robertson and The Boy had one great superstition—to wit, Cracks! For some now inexplicable reason they thought it unlucky to step on cracks; and they made daily and hourly spectacles of themselves in the streets by the eccentric irregularity of their gait. ”

“ THE BOY’S UNCLE JOHN
The Boy was red-headed and long-nosed, even from the beginning—a shy, introspective, self-conscious little boy, made peculiarly familiar with his personal defects by constant remarks that his hair was red and that his nose was long. At school, for years, he was known familiarly as “Rufus,” “Red-Head,” “Carrot-Top,” or “Nosey,” and at home it was almost as bad.
His mother, married at nineteen, was the eldest of a family of nine children, and many of The Boy’s aunts and uncles were but a few years his senior, and were his daily, familiar companions. ”

“ He was just a boy; and very often he forgets that he is not a boy now. Whatever there may be about The Boy that is commendable he owes to his father and to his mother; and he feels that he should not be held responsible for that.
His mother was the most generous and the most unselfish of human beings. She was always thinking of somebody else—always doing for others. To her it was blessèd to give, and it was not very pleasant to receive. When she bought anything, The Boy’s stereotyped query was, “Who is to have it?” ”

“ The old gardener, generally a savage defender of the place, who had no sense of humor as it was exhibited in boy nature, sometimes let the boys rake the dead leaves into great heaps and make bonfires of them, if the wind happened to be in the right direction. ”

“ The pain of parting was too great to be endured. But another Dandie came to him, one Christmas morning, to fill the aching void; and for a time again his life is not a dogless one.
ROY AND HIS MASTER
The present ruler of the household has a pedigree much longer and much straighter than his own front legs. Although he comes from a distinguished line of prize-winning thoroughbreds, he never will be [p 75]
permitted to compete for a medal on his own behalf. The Dog Show should be suppressed by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Dogs. ”

“ When he received, the next New Year, new studs and a scarf-pin—all bloodstones, to match the ring—he exhibited no little ingenuity of toilet in displaying them both, because studs are hardly visible when one wears a scarf, unless the scarf is kept out of the perpendicular by stuffing one end of it into the sleeve of a jacket; which requires constant attention and a good deal of bodily contortion.
When The Boy met Johnny Robertson or Joe Stuart making calls, they never recognized each other, except when they were calling together, which did not often occur. ”

“ He shows his affection for his friends by walking under their feet and getting his own feet stepped on, or by sitting so close to their chairs that they rock on his tail. He has been known to hold two persons literally spellbound for minutes, with his tail under the rocker of one chair and both ears under the rocker of another one. Roy’s greatest faults are barking at horses’ heels and running away. This last is very serious, and often it is annoying; but there is always some excuse for it. He generally runs away to the Williamsons’, which is the summer home of his John and his Sarah ”

“ The first thing in the morning, the last thing at night, Punch was in evidence. He went to the door to see his master safely off; he was sniffing at the inside of the door the moment the key was heard in the latch, no matter how late at night; and so long as there was light enough he watched for his master out of the window. Punch, too, had a cat—a son, or a grandson, of Whiskie’s cat. Punch’s favorite seat was in a chair in the front basement. Here, for hours, he would look out at the passers-by—indulging [p 65]
in the study of man, the proper study of his kind. ”

“ There are days when he will do everything he should do, everything he is told to do, everything he is wanted to do. There are days and days together when he does nothing that is right, when he is disobedient, disrespectful, disobliging, disagreeable, even disreputable. ”

“ Mop had absolutely no sense of fear or of animal proportions. As a catter he was never equalled; a Yale-man, by virtue of an honorary degree, he tackled everything he ever met in the feline way—with the exception of the Princeton Tiger—and he has been known to attack dogs seven times as big as himself. He learned nothing by experience: he never knew when he was thrashed. The butcher’s dog at [p 70]
Onteora whipped, and bit, and chewed him into semi-helpless unconsciousness three times a week for four months, one summer ”

“ It was the first book The Boy ever read, and he thought then, and [p 52]
sometimes he thinks now, that it was the greatest book ever written. The traditional books of the childhood of other children came later to The Boy: “Robinson Crusoe,” and the celebrated “Swiss Family” of the same name; “The Desert Home,” of Mayne Reid; Marryat’s “Peter Simple”; “The Leather Stocking Tales”; “Rob Roy”; and “The Three Guardsmen” were well thumbed and well liked; but they were not The Boy’s first love in fiction, and they never usurped, in his affections, the place of the true account of David Copperfield. ”

“ Anyway, the cat died, [p 43]
and had to be buried. The grave was dug in the garden of the tavern, near the swinging-gate to the stable, and the whole family attended the services. Jane Purdy, in a deep crape veil, was the chief mourner; The Boy’s aunts were pall-bearers, in white scarves; The Boy was the clergyman; while the kittens—who did not look at all like their mother—were on hand in a funeral basket, with black shoestrings tied around their necks. ”