ice was very
gentle:--

"Molly, run away to play--there's a dear child!"

As I obeyed, I saw that he had not let go of Cousin Molly Belle's
hands.

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Chapter IX

My Pets

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Like my games, my stockings, and my frocks, they were home-made. We had
no caged birds. Our yards and woods thrilled with bird-song all day long
for eight months of the year, and mocking-birds filled June and July
nights with music sweeter and more varied than the storied strain of the
nightingale. I had never seen a canary, and knew nothing of him except
as I had read of one in what I called a "pair of verses" to which I took
a fancy. I used to sing them to a tune of my own making when
grown-uppers were not listening:--

"Mary had a little bird,
Feathers bright and yellow,
Slender legs--upon my word
He was a pretty fellow.

"Sweetest songs he often sung
Which much delighted Mary,
And often where his cage was hung
She stood to hear Canary."

I classed Mary 'Liza with the grown-uppers. She loved cats, adopting two
when they were blind kittens, and bringing them up in just such staid
habits as made her incomparable among children. At six months of age
they would doze at her feet on the rug while she studied, or ciphered,
or read aloud, or stitched upon those everlasting chemises. When she
took a walk for exercise (she never ran, or hopped, or skipped) they
trotted demurely in the path, beside or behind her, indifferent to
butterflies and grasshoppers, and as intent upon Behavior as their
mistress. They were always fat and sleek, and ate civilized
victuals,--bread, milk, and cooked meats cut into decent, miminy-piminy
mouthfuls. Not one of them was ever known to commit the vulgarity of
catching a mouse. Mary 'Liza considered it cruel, and eating raw flesh
"a dirty habit." She, the cats, and Dorinda composed a Happy Family in
which--barring the Rozillah episode--no accidents ever happened.

From earliest childhood my love for living creatures as companions and
pets was a passion that wrought much anguish to me, and more casualties
in the dumb animal kingdom than would be credited, were I to set down
the full tale of my bantlings, and the fate of each. At a tender age, I
sturdily refused to "call mine" the downiest darlings of the
poultry-yard. There would be a few weeks of having, and loving, and
fattening, and then the axe and the bloody log at the woodpile, and the