purposes or performances. In the chambers it chewed
the sheets and pillow-cases on the beds, and in the dining-room, if it
found nothing else, it would do its best to eat the table-cloth.
Washing-day was a perfect feast for it, for then it would banquet on the
shirt-sleeves and stockings that dangled from the clothes-line, and
simply glut itself with the family linen and cotton. In default of these
dainties, Nanny would gladly eat a chip-hat; she was not proud; she
would eat a split-basket, if there was nothing else at hand. Once she
got up on the kitchen table, and had a perfect orgy with a lot of
fresh-baked pumpkin-pies she found there; she cleaned all the pumpkin so
neatly out of the pastry shells that, if there had been any more pumpkin
left, they could have been filled up again, and nobody could have told
the difference. The grandmother, who was visiting in the house at the
time, declared to the mother that it would serve the father and the boys
just right if she did fill these very shells up and give them to the
father and the boys to eat. But I believe this was not done, and it was
only suggested in a moment of awful exasperation, and because it was the
father who was to blame for letting the boys keep the goat. The mother
was always saying that the goat should not stay in the house another
day, but she had not the heart to insist on its banishment, the children
were so fond of it. I do not know why they were fond of it, for it never
showed them the least affection, but was always taking the most unfair
advantages of them, and it would butt them over whenever it got the
chance. It would try to butt them into the well when they leaned down to
pull up the bucket from the curb; and if it came out of the house, and
saw a boy cracking nuts at the low flat stone the children had in the
back-yard to crack nuts on, it would pretend that the boy was making
motions to insult it, and before he knew what he was about it would fly
at him and send him spinning head over heels. It was not of the least
use in the world, and could not be, but the children were allowed to
keep it till, one fatal day, when the mother had a number of other
ladies to tea, as the fashion used to be in small towns, when they sat
down to a comfortable gossip over dainty dishes of stewed chicken, hot
biscuit, peach-preserves, sweet tomato-pickles, and pound-cake. That day
they all laid off their bonnets on the hall table, and the goat, after
demurely wait