o introduce a truculent kitten
(and all felines are naturally truculent) into such society. And our
blood fairly congeals when we think that perhaps (oh, fearful
possibility) that kitten might nose out and wantonly destroy the too
lovely butterflies stored away in yonder closet, which we have
appropriately named the cage of gloom.

"Miss Edith must keep her kitten and may she have the pleasure of
its pretty antics. However, she must bear this in mind, that sooner
or later our pets come to grief.

"Very, very many years ago, we read and cried over a little book
written by Grace Greenwood and entitled 'The History of My Pets.'
Even as a child we wondered why it was that evil invariably befell
the pets of youth.

"We all know that most little folks are tender-hearted, yet there
are some who seem indifferent to pets, to have little sympathy with
the pathos of dumb animals. And we have so often wondered whether
after all these latter did not get more of pleasure or should we say
less of pain out of life than the others. The tender heart seldom
hardens; in maturer years its comprehensions and sympathies broaden,
and this of course involves pain. Are the delights of sympathy a
fair offset to the pains thereof?"

The boy at Amherst was the father of the man at forty-two. It was to
the prototype of "The Bench-Legged Fyce," known in Miss French's
household as "Dooley," that the boy Eugene attributed his first verse,
a parody on the well-known lines, "Oh, had I the wings of a dove!"
Dooley's song ran:

_Oh, had I wings like a dove I would fly
Away from this world of fleas;
I'd fly all round Miss Emerson's yard
And light on Miss Emerson's trees._

It was rank disloyalty to the memory of "Dooley" to rename the
bench-legged fyce "Sooner" and locate the scene of his "chronic repose"
in St. Jo rather than under the flea-proof tree of Mrs. Emerson in
Amherst. But who regrets the poetic license as he reads:

_We all hev our choice, an' you like the rest,
Allow that dorg which you've got is the best;
I wouldn't give much for the boy 'at grows up
With no friendship subsistin' 'tween him and a pup;
When a fellow gits old--I tell you it's nice
To think of his youth and his bench-legged fyce!_

Although Eugene Field never forgot or forgave the terrors of the New
England Sabbath, its strict observance, its bad singing, doleful
prayers and interminable sermons, the imp