 Section 20 of Chimes from a Jester's Bells by Robert J. Burdette. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Deborah Lynn. Chimes from a Jester's Bells by Robert J. Burdette. Section 20. Stories and Sketches. 18. Household Pets. Canum verum cano. Sometimes I can know them to my grief. Pardon the little touch of classical reminiscence with which this brochure opens. It is an old man's weakness and privilege to quote these broken scraps of bookish lore that cling to his memory, barnacles that fasten themselves to his bark, not to say bite, in the early days of his schoolboy voyages, out into the wide, wide sea of knowledge. And the here and before quotation is all that remains to me of Virgil's enid and great, or more properly speaking, garrisoned, but what wrecks it? The captain, usually, or else the pilot. In common with the majority of good men, I like dogs. I cannot say that I love man's faithful friend. I reserve my love for my human friends. I do not care to have even a good dog, as good as my neighbor is apt to own, sit at the table and dine with me. I do not enjoy having a long-haired dog with dew claws and bed with me. I prefer to sleep in fearful solitude rather than share my couch with the best dog that ever dug rats from under a henhouse. I am not partial to dogs in the parlor. Being naturally a cold, undemonstrative man, I am apt to be repellent rather than effusively cordial when, on a sultry July day, a hairy dog with an undergrowth of furry pin feathers weighing 108 pounds coming in out of the rain with an ancient and a fish-like smell, climbs into my lap and endeavors to lave my resisting face with a moist tongue eleven and one-half inches long. I know that I have sorely grieved some of my friends by coldly rejecting the cordial advances of their dogs, but I cannot help this formal demeanor on my part toward dogs with whom I am but slightly acquainted. I am so constituted by transmitted heredity and the influence of environment that I cannot endure to have a high-bred dog, which, or perhaps I had better say whom, I have just seen shaking and hauling a plebeian pig by the ear or carrying a long abandoned bone to his lair, leave his quarry and extend his prehensile tongue to salute my shrinking cheek. I am aware that I am prudish and morbidly oversensitive on this subject. People who live with dogs have told me so, but I cannot help it. True, there are dogs which, or again shall I say who, never touch anything that is offensive or unclean under the law. I know this because the dog's master has told me so himself. But I am an old man, and in the course of my long life I have met so many liars of various kinds that I am sometimes troubled by a haunting fear that even a good man, led away by his loving partiality, might at times be tempted to make misleading statements concerning the habits and sagacity of the dog of his heart. And yet I was not always thus. A savage foe of still more savage dogs. When I was a boy, every homeless dog that wandered into our neighborhood knew me for his friend, followed me home, shared my meals, destroyed our garden, and made things lively for the poultry. I still maintain that it is the inalienable right of every boy to own a dog, as many dogs indeed as his father's income and good nature will permit. It is the full-grown man whose dog makes me tired. The man always takes it for granted that you love his dog as you love him. Well, sometimes this is true, but in such a case it does not augur well for the man. Not that I love Caesar more, but that I love his master less. There was a time in happy days gone by when I sat under my own vine and fig tree and smoked the pipe of peace, the only pipe I can smoke without contracting mal-de-mer, and harmony with all mankind, and fondly watched my garden grow, for I am a lover of things that grow out of doors and stay where you put them. At times a friend sat at my side, and as we wild away the hours in sweet converse, his playful dog would gamble with his fellows my other friend's equally playful dogs upon the lawn. I kept no dog myself. I couldn't afford it. It was all I could do to maintain a dormitory and campus for the neighbor's dogs, so I selfishly reaped my enjoyment of dog-life from the merry antics of the dogs of my friends. A smooth-shaven lawn in all the delicate health of its teething year with a seventy-four pound dog creating an earth geyser in the middle of it as he burrows his excited-way china words presents a spectacle that leaves an impression upon the mind of the man who plays the lawnmower in his own open-air concerts that lasts long, long after all love for the dog has died out of his heart. My friend looks at the dog with eyes that sparkle with admiration. He's the greatest dog to dig, says he. Is he, I ask, with an interested inflection and heavy accent on the is, as though I didn't know it, but hoped it might be true. Land yes, says Amicus. He'll have a hole in your lawn that you can bury a cow in before he gets through. I say, will he, with reigning enthusiasm, and think within myself that if he will just stop when he gets a hole deep enough to bury a dog in, it will answer my purpose quite as well as I have no cow, which I wish to bury. But before he gets it quite deep enough, something discourages him and he wanders about the lawn prospecting in different places. Ha, ha, now look at them, remarks another friend upon another occasion, as four dogs of three friends, ceasing to dig in five-quarters of the reservation, open a free-for-all wrestling match in the heart of a flowerbed. Look at them, that brindled dog of mine is as strong as a bull. Is he, I ask again, with the well-simulated expression of interested innocence. Yes, indeed. He'd pull down a lion, see him worry Thornton's big dog over that rose-bush. He's only a pop, too. That fellow's only ten months old. I think, by the way he tears and tramples and crushes things, that he must be a sensory old at least, but I only say, oh. The English language is not, as some philologists have declared, a meager, inexpressive poverty-stricken tongue. It is rich, rich beyond measure in its delicate shadings of meaning. One can hardly estimate how many volumes a man may speak when he says, but oh. So I merely said, oh, with the circumflex accent on the oh. All dogs are not diggers. Dogs, at least the dogs of my friends, have gifts differing according to the spirit of destruction that is given them. Some of these dogs, whom I have known were racers, and in the early summers of my lawn these did so run that they wore a deep broad path around the house, hard as a floor of brick, whereon would grow no living thing, not even plantain, with tangent paths leading to the Sally-ports by which they left the Presidio when I shot at them from my upper windows with a Flaubert rifle. Some were gnawers, and these gnawed the Piazza posts, the hammock, the young trees, books, umbrellas, canes, door mats, garden seats, anything they could find out of doors and tried to get into the house for more. Some, again, were cat hunters, canis felinus, and these slew robbies kittens, three in succession, causing the owner of the kitten's deep childish grief, which led the masters of the dogs to remark after the carnage that he was the boss-dog for cats, you must keep your cats shut up when Bismarck Terror Avenger comes around. I meekly said I would do so hereafter, which promise I could safely make, as my stock of cats, old and juvenile, was exhausted. This did not bring quiet, however, because Bismarck Terror Avenger at Al's, deprived of their natural sources of amusement, made vigorous search for additional material, and crawled around the house and barn, digging, gnawing and scratching. I think my friends felt a little hurt at this, and believed that I had meanly concealed or sent away the remnant of cats that was left in order to deprive their dogs of a little innocent pleasure. In vain I assured them that I was entirely out of cats. My friends looked incredulous and said, It is very strange, very strange, I never knew that dog of mine to be mistaken about cats. By the way he acts there surely must be a cat somewhere about the place. I felt so aggrieved by these unjust suspicions that I went so far as to buy a cat for my friends' dogs to play with, and I went to no little trouble to get a good one, one that would please them. I do not know much about cats, so I acted on the judgment of a young man named Connors, Mr. William Connors, who lives in a sailor's lodging-house down near the wharf, to whom I had a letter of introduction and acquaintance in the sporting-line. Rady Connors, the neighbors called Mr. William. He sold me a brindled cat with but one eye and a fragmentary tail. Mr. Connors told me the cat was a pet of his little girl who died, and it broke his heart to look at her, otherwise money could not buy her. She was gentle as a dove, he said. Her name was Celeste. I carried the gentle cat home in a bird cage. She got one paw through the wires and struck the conductor in the leg as he passed my seat, as I journeyed out of the city. He came back after he had taken up the tickets and told me I must take that mole-trap into the baggage car. When I got home, a friend was sitting on my piazza watching his dog, a digger, at play in a pansy bed. I said, I have brought home a little playfellow for excavator. I then turned Celeste loose. She made for the half-married digger as stooped the hawk upon the prey, hauled him out of his hole, swept her claws across his howling face like a bosom of destruction and made life a burden to him before they had been acquainted five minutes. When the dog was too tired to play any longer, Celeste shrieked in a weird, uncanny manner and went away and I never saw her again. The next day, however, a friend who owned a cat-dog told me that early in the preceding evening an Allegheny mountain wildcat came into his yard, fell upon a venture, tore the face off him like a mask, and otherwise so lacerated and cat-handled him that next morning the sight of a little kitten no bigger than a mole scared him so that he ran halfway up the side of a two-story barn before he knew where he was going. I didn't say anything about Celeste because when I wondered that there should be wild cats infesting the lawns of suburban Philadelphia, the man grew very angry and offered to go before a justice of the peace and make affidavit to it. So for the sake of peace I said I believed him. If I believed one-half of one-tenth of the things I tell people I do, my creed, measuring thirty-nine articles to the foot, would reach from here to the moon. I have always been afraid that Mr. Connors deceived me about that cat. Some of the dogs of my friends were sleepers, Canis somnolentus. These would sneak into the house and crawl under the sofa or climb upon the best beds in the house in slumber and play tag with the pillow-shams and pursue the elusive flea over their persons. There appears to be a strong esprit de corps among fleas. I have ever noticed that fleas from different dogs never agreed with the human persons to whom they emigrated. By nature I am not a revengeful man. The few murders I have committed in the course of a wild and wandering career when I have had abundant opportunities to commit many more were not the outgrowth of cold premeditation and a tigerish desire for blood. The massacres were in the strict line of duty as a war correspondent and they were not congenial to me. Many a time have I risen from my desk, my soul sick of carnage, and reeled away to wash my dripping pen at the nearest pump, feeling that if the paper required any more slaughter on the next day it would have to hire a new man to do its butchery. I have ever maintained that it is the business of the armies in the field to do the killing and that some combatant other than the war correspondent should expose himself to death and strew the gory field with ghastly heaps of slain. But no, under our artificial civilization all this the correspondent has to do himself. Take away the sword, armies can be destroyed without it. But while I am a peace-loving, forgiving man near the close of the summer to which I have referred I bought a young cow. She was a callow-timid young thing, somewhat shy and rather giddy as a cow was apt to be in that sweet caramel time of life. Her voice was changing and when she ran sideways a few steps, twisted her tail in a very unladylike manner and tried to sing, she gave utterance to the most extraordinary tones that ever startled an inexperienced cowherd. But with all her foolish little affectations she was good-hearted and I made allowance for the inevitable silliness of her first season. She had a mild jersey eye and a Texas appetite. One evening I called on one of my friends to enjoy the sunset from his piazza. He is a very wealthy man who had the sunset on the western side of his house because he said that was so much the pleasanter side in the evening. He said the morning sun shone on the east piazza which would make it very disagreeable if one had to view the sunset from that side. Ami, what a priceless boon is wealth. Now I am not able to command such luxuries. Consequently the sun sets all around my house wherever it pleases, like a hen. When I made this call I took Joshua, the cow, with me. I call her Joshua because she is the son of none. She was very reluctant to lead and had me on several sides of the road four or five times as we sauntered along in the level rays of the declining sun. I forget what it was declining but it was very red in the face. When we reached our friend's house I was glad to sit down and tie Joshua to a cast iron dog on the piazza. My friend is very fond of sculpture and once told me that he had picked up that dog at an art sale for seven dollars. He thinks it is certainly an old master as he can find no one who can tell him who sculptured it. The family seemed surprised to see Joshua with me but I said, Oh, love me, love my cow, you know. I couldn't get away without her. We are inseparables. That cow has more sense than most men. She watches for me when I am away and when she sees me coming there is something touching in her demonstrations of affectionate welcome. No matter how tired or sick she may be she always runs to meet me. Wherever I go she goes. Doesn't she girly? I had never heard this said about a cow but many times had it given to me about dogs so I said my piece pretty well. When I finished Joshua stood on her hands and trilled a stave from the drinking chorus in Meyer beer and all the people shrank back a little while the cast iron dog turned pale. She's great on that I said enthusiastically. I never yet saw a cow who could stand in the same pasture with her on that hand spring trick. It's a little rough on a man's lawn though my friend said looking sadly at Joshua's hoof prints in the velvet grass. Oh, I said proudly that's nothing just wait a few minutes until she begins to feel at home and bucks. She feels a little strange now of course I added sympathetically but when she gets used to all these strange faces and feels good she'll jump about eight feet in the air come down with her four hooves so close together you could cover them with a ladies handkerchief. Then she'll just spread them and tear up more sod in one scratch than you can put back in a week. At that moment a nurse maid came along wheeling a little cab with a sweet little baby therein. Joshua fired out her hind leg knocked the top off the cab upset the nurse and raised bedlam on the piazza. My child, my child! shrieked the mother but the baby wasn't hurt and by and by think quieted down a little. I said that Donna didn't like babies and they'd better keep their children in the house when she came with me. She's a whole league nine to kick! I said I call her prima donna because she's such a kicker. My friend didn't say anything and I felt afraid that he was a little touched with envy so I rose to go. Just then prima donna buck high in the air jerking the old master from his perch on the piazza. This frightened her and she bolted and away they went, militia I call her militia because she's such a good runner and the iron dog. Over the lawn through the flower beds down the gravel walks around the house the iron dog bouncing and jumping like a thing of life. I laughed till I cried. I never saw her in such spirits I said just wait until she sees Bismarck. My friend did not reply. He was crying as much as I was but I don't think he was laughing so hardly. At that instant Luna I call her Luna because she comes on tide so often saw Bismarck, the cat dog. With one jump she broke the leg off the iron dog reached Bismarck in a single bound and with a little coquettish play of her neck had him away up in the leafy branches of a maple tree wondering how he got there and how he was going to get down. Then traveler, I call her traveler because she is on the road half of the time went down the turnpike on the run with the leg of the iron dog swinging at the end of her leading strap like a slung shot greatly to the annoyance of such people as she chanced to knock out with it stifling his desire to laugh at my dismay over the sudden disappearance of Comet I named her Comet because she is so erratic in her movements my friend with that delicate courtesy which is one of the charms of high culture said changing the subject to relieve my painful confusion this lawn looks as though some wooden-headed fool had pastured a drove of hogs like himself upon it a hundred dollars won't put it where it was half an hour ago and where it would be now if the fool killer had called on the right man an hour ago I could not bear to see him so distressed on my account so I concealed for the moment my anxiety about boy her name is boy because you never know where she is or what she is doing when she is out of your sight and said reassuringly oh this isn't anything you should see Thornton's garden I took her over there with me last evening and she stayed all night and played with the dog Thornton has been in bed ever since but it didn't seem to cheer him up and he continued abstracted and constrained in his manner so I made him a do with my usual grave and quiet courtesy and went home a week or two after that just as I had got Baron well introduced into society I call her Baron because she is so poor the man came to me one morning and said she didn't seem to be well she went to the barn Beatrice for it was indeed she was dead she was swollen to the size of a sugar hog's head her neck was broken and axe was sticking in her head and there were five or six large perforations in her body several bullets were embedded in the side of her stall and we found in her feed box mixed with her brand pounded glass rough on rats and a package of strychnine I sent for the cow doctor and a detective they examined the cow and the premises carefully and asked them if they didn't think Julius Caesar I called her that because she was dead had been tampered with but they said no she had died a natural death the cow physician who knew her well said he thought she died of old age I said indignantly that she was only a year old but he said that a year was a very long time for some cows to live End of Section 20 Section 21 of Chimes from a Jester's Bells by Robert J. Burdette this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Deborah Lynn Chimes from a Jester's Bells by Robert J. Burdette Section 21 Stories and Sketches 19 The Strike at Hinman's Away back in the 50s Hinman's was not only the best school in Peoria but it was the greatest school in the world I sincerely thought so then and as I was a very lively part of it I should know Mr. Hinman was the faculty and he was sufficiently numerous to demonstrate cube root with one hand and maintain discipline with the other dear old man boys and girls with grandchildren love him today and think of him among their blessings he was superintendent of public instruction board of education school trustee county superintendent principal of the high school and janitor he had a pleasant smile a genius for mathematics he carried upon his person a grip that would make the imported malady which mocks that name in these degenerate days call itself slack in very terror at having assumed the wrong title we used to have general exercises on Friday afternoon the most exciting feature of this weekly frivolity consisted of a free-for-all exercise in mental arithmetic Mr. Hinman gave out lists of numbers beginning with easy ones and speaking slowly each succeeding list he dictated more rapidly and with ever-increasing complications of addition subtraction, multiplication, and division until at last he was giving them out faster than he could talk one by one the pupils dropped out of the race with despairing faces but always at the closing peremptory answer at least a dozen hands shot into the air and as many voices shouted the correct result we didn't have many books and the curriculum of an Illinois school in those days was not academic but two things the children could do they could spell as well as the dictionary and they could handle figures some of the fellows fairly wallowed in them I didn't I simply drowned in the shallowest pond of numbers that ever spread itself on the page as even unto this day I do the same well one year the teacher introduced an innovation compositions by the girls and speaking pieces by the boys it was easy enough for the girls who had only to read the beautiful thought that spring is the pleasantest season of the year now and then a new girl from the east awfully precise would begin her essay spring is the most pleasant season of the year and her we would call down with derisive laughter where at she walked to her seat very stiffly with a proud dry-eyed look in her face only to lay her head upon her desk when she reached it and weep silently until school closed but speaking pieces did not meet with favor from the boys save one or two good boys who were in training by their parents for congressmen or presidents the rest of us who were just boys with no desire ever to be anything else endured the tyranny of compulsory oratory about a month and then resolved to abolish the whole business by a general revolt big and little we agreed to stand by each other break up the new exercise and get back to the old order of things the hurdle races in mental arithmetic and the geographical chance which we could run and in tone together was I a mutineer? we'll say son your pa was a constituent conspirator he was in the color guard you see the first boy called on for a declamation was to announce the strike and as my name stood very high in the alphabetical role of pupils I had an excellent chance of leading the assaulting column a distinction for which I was not at all ambitious being a stripling of tender years ruddy countenance and sensitive feelings however I stiffened the sinews of my soul girded on my armor by slipping an atlas back under my jacket and was ready for the fray feeling a little terrified shiver of delight as I thought that the first lick Mr. Hinman gave me would make him think he had broken my back the hour for speaking pieces an hour big with fate arrived on time a boy named A.B. Abbott was called up ahead of me but he happened to be one of the presidential aspirants he was mate on an Illinois river steamboat stern-wheeler at that the last I knew of him and of course he flunked and said his piece a sadly prophetic selection Mr. President it is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope we made such suggestive and threatening gestures at him however when Mr. Hinman wasn't looking that he forgot half his piece broke down and cried he also cried after school a little more bitterly and with far better reason then after an awful pause in which the conspirators could hear the beating of each other's hearts my name was called I sat still at my desk and said I ain't going to speak no piece Mr. Hinman looked gently surprised and asked why not Robert I replied because there ain't going to be any more speaking pieces the teacher's eyes grew round and big as he inquired who says there will not I said in slightly firmer tones as I realized that the moment had come for dragging the rest of the rebels into court all of us boys but Mr. Hinman smiled and said quietly that he guessed there would be a little more speaking before the close of the session then laying his hand on my shoulder with most punctilious but chilling courtesy he invited me to the rostrum the rostrum was twenty-five feet distant but I arrived there on schedule time and only touched my feet to the floor twice on my way and then in there under Mr. Hinman's judicious coaching before the assembled school with feelings, nay, emotions which I now shudder to recall I did my first song and dance many times before had I stepped off a solo cacuca to the staccato pleasing of a fragment of slate frame upon which my tutor was a gifted performer but never until that day did I accompany myself with words Boy-like I had chosen for my piece a poem sweetly expressive of those peaceful virtues which I most heartily despised so that my performance at the inauguration of the strike as Mr. Hinman conducted the overture ran something like this oh not for me whack is the rolling whack drum or the whack whack trumpet's wild whack appeal boo-hoo or the cry swish whack of boo-hoo-hoo war when the whack foe has come out or the a-wow whack flashing whack whack steel woo-hoo woo-hoo words and symbols cannot convey to the most gifted imagination the gestures with which I illustrated the seven stanzas of this beautiful poem I had really selected it to please my mother whom I had invited to be present when I supposed I would deliver it but the fact that she attended a missionary meeting in the Baptist church that afternoon made me a friend of missions forever suffice it to say then that my pantomime kept pace and time with Mr. Hinman's system of punctuation until the last line was sobbed and whacked out I groped my bewildered way to my seat through a mist of tears and sat down gingerly in sideways intently wondering why an inscrutable providence had given to the rugged rhinoceros the hide which the eternal fitness of things had plainly prepared for the schoolboy but I quickly forgot my own sorrow and dried my tears with laughter in the enjoyment of the subsequent acts of the opera as the chorus developed the plot in action Mr. Hinman, who had been somewhat gentle with me dealt firmly with the larger boy who followed and there was a scene of revelry for the next twenty minutes the old man shook Bill Morrison until his teeth rattled so you couldn't hear him cry he hit Mickey McCann, the tough boy from the lower prairie and Mickey ran out and lay down off he hit Jake Bailey across the legs with a slate frame and it hurt so that Jake couldn't howl he just opened his mouth wide, held up his hands gasped and forgot his own name he pushed Bill Haskell into a seat and the bench broke he ran across the room and reached out for Lem Harkins and Lem had a fit before the old man touched him he shook Dan Stevenson for two minutes and when he let him go Dan walked around his own desk five times before he could find it and then he couldn't sit down without holding on he whipped the two Naltons with a skate strap in each hand at the same time the Greenwood family, five boys and a big girl he whipped all at once with a girl's skipping rope and they raised such a united wail that the clock stopped he took a twist in Bill Roddicker's front hair and Bill slept with his eyes open for a week he kept the atmosphere of that school room full of dust and splinters and the lint weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth until he reached the end of the alphabet and all hearts ached and weird of the inhuman strife and wicked contention then he stood up before us a sickening tangle of slate, frame, strap, ebony, feral and skipping rope a smile on his kind old face and asked in clear triumphant tones who says there isn't going to be any more speaking pieces and every last boy in that school sprang to his feet standing there as one human being with one great mouth reshrieked in concerted anguish nobody don't and your pa, my son, who led that strike has been speaking pieces ever since End of Section 21 Section 22 of Chimes from a Jester's Bells by Robert J. Burdette this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Deborah Lynn Chimes from a Jester's Bells by Robert J. Burdette Section 22, Stories and Sketches can't have stopped this the parson of a struggling church was lying in his bed three months of rears of salary was pillowing his head his couch was strewn with tradesmen's bills that pricked his heart like thorns and nearly all life's common eels were goading him like horns the deacons sat beside him as the moments ticked away and bent his head to catch the words the parson had to say if I never shall arise from this hard bed on which I lie if my warfare is accomplished and it's time for me to die take a message to the janitor before I pass away tell him fires are for December and the windows are for May tell him when he lays the notices upon the pulpit's height to shove them neath the cushion far out of reach and sight and when he hears the preacher's voice and whispers soft expire that is the time to slam the door and rattle at the fire and the deacons tell the deacons too through all the busy week to hang their boots up in the sun to hatch a Sunday squeak with steel shod canes to poke the man who comes to church to snore and use the boys who laugh in church to mop the vestry floor there's another too the woman who talks the sermon through tell her I do not mind her buzz my hearing days are few tell her to leave her mouth at home some Sunday for a minute and listen to a text at least without a whisper in it and tell the board of trustees not to weep with bitter tears for I can't be any deader now than they have been for years and tell half my congregation that I'm glad salvation's free for that's the only chance for them between the desk and me and a farewell to the choir how the name my memory racks if they could get up their voices as they do get up their backs while the stars would join their music and the welcome would rejoice while the happy congregation could not hear a single voice but tell them I forgive them and oh tell them that I said I wanted them to come and sing above me when I'm dead his voice grew faint and hoarser but it gave a laughing break a kind of gurgling chuckle as a minister might make but the deacon rose up slowly and sternly he looked down upon the parson's twinkling eyes with most portentous frown and he stiffly said good morning as he walked off in his ire for the deacon was the leader of that aviable choir End of Section 22 End of Stories and Sketches End of Chimes from a Jester's Bells by Robert J. Burdett