Margaret Benson

“ It is the funniest thing in the world to see guinea-pigs fighting. They stand on the tips of their toes and raise their noses, until they present the chin only to their adversaries; then they begin to dance round, always chin to chin, gnashing their teeth; when they see a good opportunity they fly in and bite. It is a scientific way of fighting, like wrestling or fencing—quite different from the indiscriminate plunge of a cat, who rolls round in a heap with her adversary. ”

“ From whatever point you look at them, unfledged canaries are altogether and absolutely hideous; their brownish-pink skin is scantily covered with hairs, little bits of flesh wave helplessly about where their wings and legs are going to be, they have two large dark swellings where their eyes are going to be, and the only thing that is defined about them is a huge mouth which is almost always open and yelling. I had to pick the canary up from the bottom of the cage, and I still owe Jack a grudge for it, though I cannot in justice blame him. ”

“ The little gentleman had caught a cold, not much of a cold at first; he only panted slightly as he sat near the little lady and ruffled his feathers; but she cheered him up, and smoothed the feathers down, and they sat side by side and looked at the world with little meaningless grey eyes.
Their new large cage was a great excitement, and it was immense fun for them to walk over the top, using their beak as a third leg, and that the most reliable. And their spirits ran so high that they began to shriek unmusically at each other when they found themselves at opposite corners of the cage. ”

“ They came down from London in a tiny cage,—a travelling cage. Budgerrygars do not mind lack of room, it makes it all the easier for them to sit quite close, as if they were glued together. They were lovely little things, with their pearl-grey beaks,—wonderfully sharp and strong those beaks are, as I know to my cost,—but they could use them gently, and you would see one turn with a soft croon to put straight a ruffled feather on its mate’s head. ”

“ The cat might come and was welcome, and liked the benevolent old gentleman. Just as one would not like anybody to come and take half of one’s armchair, but might be rather flattered if a cat or a little dog jumped up to settle itself there. Cats were only cats, and fit subjects for philanthropy, but other dogs were his own ill-bred relatives. As some one summed it up, “Watch doesn’t care for dogs.”
The other dogs could not be expected to appreciate this, and Watch’s airs provoked at last one outburst from King, the steady old patriarchal collie of the farm. ”

“ I never saw such courting before or since, but I shall never lose the feeling of intimacy, for I know now that grasshoppers are not always little machines arranged with the greatest amount of muscle for the smallest amount of weight, or wound up to trill on in the sunshine, as mechanically as a watch ticks, or even created to be a burden,—but they are tiny creatures, full of emotion and insect loves, putting their best energy into their whirring song to claim the admiration of the languid, lovely creatures that lie lazily listening. ”

“ There must be something more than grandeur and cynicism to make a gentleman allow his children to die of starvation.
At last we found out the reason—Jack was flirting with his first love! Thyrsis’ cage was hung in Jack’s sight, and instead of feeding his infant children, or attending to them in any way, he clung to the corner of his cage all day and serenaded Thyrsis. We put Thyrsis out of his sight; Mummy laid a second set of eggs, and Jack attended to them as if he had done it all his life. ”

“ Pasht had been for many days very eager to go into the garden. One morning we were playing croquet on the lawn, and I paid no attention to the kitten, until suddenly I looked up to see her lying on the path, her long thick hair fluffed out, her sweet mouse-coloured cat’s visage resting on the edge of the grass, her little chin rubbing against it, and her long squirrel tail lazily sweeping and thumping the gravel. ”

“ A procession, of my nurse holding a cup of milk and water, myself and my youngest brother (who was too naughty to be left alone) , could be seen crossing the field three times a day to bathe the kid’s eyes.
When the kids were old enough to do without their mother, we gave Marcap away. I did not mind parting with Marcap; I never should have got fond of her, for she had no idea of intimacy. But to part with a kid was a different matter; it took us a long time to decide that it would be better to keep the biggest and strongest kid, Capricorn; and we gave away the little one. ”

“ Not only was there Callaway the cowman, who became house-builder to the community, but my old nurse used to take the guinea-pigs a breakfast of soaked bread every morning; and we had a butler sagacious about animals, to appeal to as a highest authority on all difficult questions. So when, one morning, I opened the slide, to find two new white things about as big as large mice gaily running about, the first thing I did was to run to the servants’ hall and summon the butler to advise in this difficult and delicate situation. ”

“ THE DESERTED LOVER 65 EVER since I was a very small child I had longed to possess a pair of budgerrygars. There was a tradition of three live ones once in our family, in proof whereof my nurse could point to a little stuffed bird in its case. I used to gaze with longing at that beautiful green and yellow creature, with the speckled back and the black and blue feathers in its neck, sitting with a foreground of quaking grasses and an eternal blue sky behind. ”

“ JACK 75 FEW people know how different one bird is from another of the same kind. Of course we can see when one canary is green and one yellow and one crested; but few people know that some canaries have blue eyes, some brown, and some grey; or how different one canary is in intelligence and character from another.
Jack was a remarkably intelligent canary; one always felt him to be immensely superior to oneself. ”

“ Persis lives in a condition of perpetual, jealous misery; if she thinks the kitten is sent away, or that she is exclusively favoured, then only does she emerge out of sullenness. And yet she is not really devoted to me; she is only a complete egoist, and cannot be happy unless I am devoted to her. After all, am I not bound to her? Was she not once my sole and only cat, carried about, exhibited to company, hunted for if she got lost? And yet Pasht is much fonder of me than Persis ever was; Pasht will run after me,27 while Persis wishes to run away and be fetched back. ”

“ Some children on the place had a tame rabbit which was very fond of cats. One day she met him out of doors. He saw her and came running to play with her; she looked with a horrified face for a moment14 then turned and fled; she must have thought him a deformed sort of cat; much as if children met a human being with huge pendent ears and an uncouth way of walking who wanted to come and play with them.
Persis was very musical. If one whistled to her she would come from any part of the room, creep up as near to one’s face as she could, purr loudly, lick one’s face in growing rapture ”

“ Gypsy was a mere flirt; he never would have had nests and eggs and brought up families like other birds; he was a mule-bird, and they cannot be domestic.
Gypsy had one last flickering of flirtation. I took his cage out one day into a London garden, and sat with him under a tree, and he sang loud; suddenly I heard a sound very unfamiliar in London, the voice of a bird which was hopping about on the tree above. I looked up, and through the leaves I could see that it was a little goldfinch; but it was shy and flew away.
These mule-birds die generally very suddenly ”

“ For with all the higher animals—that is to say, with all the animals one intimately knows—there is some beauty of intelligence, physique, or character which renders them, as one must necessarily believe they are, ends in themselves, not only means to the perfection of our very egotistic species. The dog, for instance, has at anyrate moral beauty, and the stag physical; but the cat, who so often loses her physical beauty after the first year of her life, and who slinks about10 with a weight of strange and secret care on her shoulders, what has she? ”

“ Who understands the miracle by which an utterly selfish creature, whose natural instinct is to hate all other animals, and, indeed, only to tolerate human beings because it can make use of them, should be made to know and feel, in a short ten minutes’ space perhaps, an overpowering, passionate, protective love? ”

“ Now and then you find a dog which will bring a broken-legged friend to the hospital, a cat which brings its half-starved neighbour to eat its own dinner,—souls of philanthropists on pilgrimage, dead or yet to be ”

“ Even sprouting wing-feathers might have broken its fall a little, on the many occasions when it tried to get out of the nest and fell on its back on the bottom of the cage. One day it had a fall more serious than usual, and till evening it sat on the edge of its waterglass with its head hanging down and its neck apparently dislocated. In the morning I found it dead in the waterglass. So I do not know to this day which accident it died of.
But meanwhile a sudden stirring of domestic instincts came to Thyrsis, and she was stimulated to rival Mummy’s nest-building. ”

“ If you keep a whole family, you will find that there is not only a parental, filial, brotherly, and sisterly relation, but also a grand-parental. When Midge had some white kittens, Jenny, whose under-bred offspring had been put out of the way shortly before, helped her to nurse them, with as much pride and perhaps more solicitude than Midge herself showed. ”

“ If I came there to speak to the cat, she went quickly away, if the kitten approached her she spit, and if it came nearer, hit out at it. Evidently the change had come in Persis from a kitten to a cat. She was a mere domestic cat, with a not very amiable temper, she cared no more for human24 beings, and had arrived at the queer alienation from the young when they are grown up which comes to nearly all creatures; she had had half a human soul once, but she had fulfilled the animal functions, and she was an animal again. ”

“ Some people and animals one never gets near. You may, for instance, sit opposite people in church for years, know all their Sunday dresses and hats, and how much they give in the offertory, and be not a bit nearer to them in the end than at the beginning. Such is the acquaintance one has with caterpillars; they are always just the same; they eat and grow and become cocoons, and reappear as butterflies, and there is no character from beginning to end. That is partly why they are such excellent symbols.
Then there are some animals that have no sense of intimacy ”

“ The change that her child can work in a grumbling, egotistical woman is incomprehensible,—could not have been argued by any logic; but far more surprising the event must be to a creature who does not know what is going to happen, cannot guess that her feelings will be moved in a totally new way, and could not realise beforehand that such an event might happen to her as it had to others. I tried to prepare Persis once; I gave her a stuffed kitten on a penwiper to play with. ”

“ They will take it from your fingers, and, without the slightest shame at “talking shop” in public, will roll it into a neat, hard, black ball, crushing up legs and wings alike, and stow it away inside the nest.
But the want of intimacy characteristic of many insects is not characteristic of insects as such. I once attended a grasshopper crisis. There was nothing professional about the grasshoppers; they did not not “spend themselves in leaps ... to reach the sun.” They did not think the least bit in the world about the sun, they were merely private individuals—courting. ”

“ Sometimes one meets animals for an hour or two, sometimes one accidentally lights upon them in a crisis of their lives,—such even as their death,—and one suddenly and unexpectedly understands and knows them. ”

“ But men hunted the hoopoes through the length and breadth of the land, and they killed them for the sake of their golden crowns; then the hoopoes cried to King Solomon, for King Solomon knew the voice of all beasts and birds, yea of the creeping things also, and the hoopoes said, “Take away our crowns, O king, for men kill us for the sake of our golden crowns.” ”

“ After this she became acquainted with a Gordon setter, and the obstinate curliness of Di’s hair gave Persis as much occupation as those black spots on Don’s back which never would come off. But she was jealous of none of these, she knew herself to be—as a cat—so infinitely superior to them. She18 was jealous of nobody and nothing until her kittens came.
There are certain great facts in life which nothing can prepare you for. No amount of reasoning, no previous imagination, will make you in the least able to calculate your feelings. ”

“ A FAITHFUL FRIEND
97 WE were called into my mother’s room one day, and shown a hamper which had just arrived. The hamper was strangely agitated, like that hasty-pudding in which Tom Thumb sheltered, and when it was opened out rolled a puppy! It was a collie puppy, long haired, black, with tan98 cheeks, a white tip to his tail, white collar and paws, and wholly fascinating.
It was really a charming puppy; at present too young to sin; too young to do anything but roll about and be petted. ”

“ Enid was the first to have a baby, and she had only one—a fat round one, which grew and prospered until one day when he suddenly disappeared. We searched and hunted with anxious hearts, but with no result. After a time we wanted to move the hutches to a new place, and when we took up that in which poor Enid and the baby lived, there was a hole under it—a rat’s hole, and at the end of the hole, as we peered down, we saw a little white thing—the skin and bones of a baby guinea-pig. Enid never had another baby ”

“ The swans lived on in peace and happiness through the autumn and winter, but in the spring, when they ought to have been nesting, some wicked boy hit the lady swan on the head with a stick, and she sickened and died. ”