i killd a Bare in Maine 600 lbs waight
she wrote:
Isn’t it generally spelled Bear?
but she gave up the attempt when he responded:
a bare is a mene animle any way you spel him
The Spring wore on, and the Summer came, and still the evening drink and the evening correspondence brightened the close of each day for the little seamstress. And the draught of porter put her to sleep each night, giving her a calmer rest than she had ever known during her stay in the noisy city; and it began, moreover, to make a little “meet” for her. And then the thought that she was going to have an hour of pleasant companionship somehow gave her courage to cook and eat her little dinner, however tired she was. The seamstress’s cheeks began to blossom with the June roses.
And all this time Mr. Smith kept his vow of silence unbroken, though the seamstress sometimes tempted him with little ejaculations and exclamations to which he might have responded. He was silent and invisible. Only the smoke of his pipe, and the clink of his mug as he set it down on the cornice, told her that a living, material Smith was her correspondent. They never met on the stairs, for their hours of coming and going did not coincide. Once or twice they passed each other in the street – but Mr. Smith looked straight ahead of him, about a foot over her head. The little seamstress thought he was a very fine-looking man, with his six feet one and three-quarters and his thick brown beard. Most people would have called him plain.
Once she spoke to him. She was coming home one Summer evening, and a gang of corner-loafers stopped her and demanded money to buy beer, as is their custom. Before she had time to be frightened, Mr. Smith appeared – whence, she knew not – scattered the gang like chaff, and, collaring two of the human hyenas, kicked them, with deliberate, ponderous, alternate kicks, until they writhed in ineffable agony. When he let them crawl away, she turned to him and thanked him warmly, looking very pretty now, with the color in her cheeks. But Mr. Smith answered no word. He stared over her head, grew red in the face, fidgeted nervously, but held his peace until his eyes fell on a rotund Teuton, passing by.
“Say, Dutchy!” he roared.
The German stood aghast.
“I ain’t got nothing to write with!” thundered Mr. Smith, looking him in the eye. And then the man of his word passed on his way.
And so the Summer went on, and the two correspondents chatted silently from window to window, hid from sight of all the world below by the friendly cornice. And they looked out over the roof, and saw the green of Tompkins Square grow darker and dustier as the months went on.
Mr. Smith was given to Sunday trips into the suburbs, and he never came back without a bunch of daisies or black-eyed Susans or, later, asters or golden-rod for the little seamstress. Sometimes, with a sagacity rare in his sex, he brought her a whole plant, with fresh loam for potting.
He gave her also a reel in a bottle, which, he wrote, he had “maid” himself, and some coral, and a dried flying-fish, that was somewhat fearful to look upon, with its sword-like fins and its hollow eyes. At first, she could not go to sleep with that flying-fish hanging on the wall.
But he surprised the little seamstress very much one cool September evening, when he shoved this letter along the cornice:
The little seamstress gazed at this letter a long time. Perhaps she was wondering in what Ready Letter-Writer of the last century Mr. Smith had found his form. Perhaps she was amazed at the results of his first attempt at punctuation. Perhaps she was thinking of something else, for there were tears in her eyes and a smile on her small mouth.
But it must have been a long time, and Mr. Smith must have grown nervous, for presently another communication came along the line where the top of the cornice was worn smooth. It read:
If not understood will you mary me
The little seamstress seized a piece of paper and wrote:
If I say Yes, will you speak to me?
Then she rose and passed it out to him, leaning out of the window, and their faces met.
ZENOBIA’S INFIDELITY
Dr. Tibbitt stood on the porch of Mrs. Pennypepper’s boarding-house, and looked up and down the deserted Main Street of Sagawaug with a contented smile, the while he buttoned his driving-gloves. The little doctor had good cause to be content with himself and with everything else – with his growing practice, with his comfortable boarding-house, with his own good-looks, with his neat attire, and with the world in general. He could not but be content with Sagawaug, for there never was a prettier country town. The Doctor looked across the street and picked out the very house that he proposed to buy when the one remaining desire of his soul was gratified. It was a house with a hip-roof and with a long garden running down to the river.
There was no one in the house to-day, but there was no one in any of the houses. Not even a pair of round bare arms was visible among the clothes that waved in the August breeze in every back-yard. It was Circus Day in Sagawaug.
The Doctor was climbing into his gig when a yell startled him. A freckled boy with saucer eyes dashed around the corner.
“Doctor!” he gasped, “come quick! The circus got a-fire an’ the trick elephant’s most roasted!”
“Don’t be silly, Johnny,” said the Doctor, reprovingly.
“Hope to die – Honest Injun – cross my breast!” said the boy. The Doctor knew the sacredness of this juvenile oath.
“Get in here with me,” he said, “and if I find you’re trying to be funny, I’ll drop you in the river.”
As they drove toward the outskirts of the town, Johnny told his tale.
“Now,” he began, “the folks was all out of the tent after the show was over, and one of the circus men, he went to the oil-barrel in the green wagon with Dan’l in the Lion’s Den onto the outside of it, an’ he took in a candle an’ left it there, and fust thing the barrel busted, an’ he wasn’t hurted a bit, but the trick elephant she was burned awful, an’ the ring-tailed baboon, he was so scared he had a fit. Say, did you know baboons had fits?”
When they reached the circus-grounds, they found a crowd around a small side-show tent. A strong odor of burnt leather confirmed Johnny’s story. Dr. Tibbitt pushed his way through the throng, and gazed upon the huge beast, lying on her side on the grass, her broad shoulder charred and quivering. Her bulk expanded and contracted with spasms of agony, and from time to time she uttered a moaning sound. On her head was a structure of red cloth, about the size of a bushel-basket, apparently intended to look like a British soldier’s forage-cap. This was secured by a strap that went under her chin – if an elephant has a chin. This scarlet cheese-box every now and then slipped down over her eye, and the faithful animal patiently, in all her anguish, adjusted it with her prehensile trunk.
By her side stood her keeper and the proprietor of the show, a large man with a dyed moustache, a wrinkled face, and hair oiled and frizzed. These two bewailed their loss alternately.
“The boss elephant in the business!” cried the showman. “Barnum never had no trick elephant like Zenobia. And them lynes and Dan’l was painted in new before I took the road this season. Oh, there’s been a hoodoo on me since I showed ag’inst the Sunday-school picnic!”
“That there elephant’s been like my own child,” groaned the keeper, “or my own wife, I may say. I’ve slep’ alongside of her every night for fourteen damn years.”
The Doctor had been carefully examining his patient.
“If there is any analogy – ” he began.
“Neuralogy!” snorted the indignant showman; “‘t ain’t neuralogy, you jay pill-box, she’s cooked!”
“If there is any analogy,” repeated Dr. Tibbitt, flushing a little, “between her case and that of a human being, I think I can save your elephant. Get me a barrel of linseed oil, and drive these people away.”
The Doctor’s orders were obeyed with eager submission. He took off his coat, and went to work. He had never doctored an elephant, and the job interested him. At the end of an hour, Zenobia’s sufferings were somewhat alleviated. She lay on her side, chained tightly to the ground, and swaddled in bandages. Her groans had ceased.
“I’ll call to-morrow at noon,” said the Doctor – “good gracious, what’s that?” Zenobia’s trunk was playing around his waistband.
“She wants to shake hands with you,” her keeper explained. “She’s a lady, she is, and she knows you done her good.”
“I’d rather not have any thing of the sort,” said the Doctor, decisively.
When Dr. Tibbitt called at twelve on the morrow, he found Zenobia’s tent neatly roped in, an amphitheatre of circus-benches constructed around her, and this amphitheatre packed with people.
“Got a quarter apiece from them jays,” whispered the showman, “jest to see you dress them wownds.” Subsequently the showman relieved his mind to a casual acquaintance. “He’s got a heart like a gun-flint, that doctor,” he said; “made me turn out every one of them jays and give ’em their money back before he’d lay a hand to Zenobia.”
But if the Doctor suppressed the clinic, neither he nor the showman suffered. From dawn till dusk people came from miles around to stare a quarter’s worth at the burnt elephant. Once in a while, as a rare treat, the keeper lifted a corner of her bandages, and revealed the seared flesh. The show went off in a day or two, leaving Zenobia to recover at leisure; and as it wandered westward, it did an increased business simply because it had had a burnt trick elephant. Such, dear friends, is the human mind.
The Doctor fared even better. The fame of his new case spread far and wide. People seemed to think that if he could cure an elephant he could cure any thing. He was called into consultation in neighboring towns. Women in robust health imagined ailments, so as to send for him and ask him shuddering questions about “that wretched animal.” The trustees of the orphan-asylum made him staff-physician – in this case the Doctor thought he could trace a connection of ideas, in which children and a circus were naturally associated. And the local newspaper called him a savant.
He called every day upon Zenobia, who greeted him with trumpetings of joyful welcome. She also desired to shake hands with him, and her keeper had to sit on her head and hold her trunk to repress the familiarity. In two weeks she was cured, except for extensive and permanent scars, and she waited only for a favorable opportunity to rejoin the circus.
The Doctor had got his fee in advance.
***
Upon a sunny afternoon in the last of August, Dr. Tibbitt jogged slowly toward Sagawaug in his neat little gig. He had been to Pelion, the next town, to call upon Miss Minetta Bunker, the young lady whom he desired to install in the house with the garden running down to the river. He had found her starting out for a drive in Tom Matson’s dog-cart. Now, the Doctor feared no foe, in medicine or in love; but when a young woman is inscrutable as to the state of her affections, when the richest young man in the county is devoting himself to her, and when the young lady’s mother is backing the rich man, a young country doctor may well feel perplexed and anxious over his chance of the prize.
The Doctor was so troubled, indeed, that he paid no heed to a heavy, repeated thud behind him, on the macadamized road. His gentle little mare heard it, though, and began to curvet and prance. The Doctor was pulling her in, and calming her with a “Soo – Soo – down, girl, down!” when he interrupted himself to shout:
“Great Cæsar! get off me!”
Something like a yard of rubber hose had come in through the side of the buggy, and was rubbing itself against his face. He looked around, and the cold sweat stood out on him as he saw Zenobia, her chain dragging from her hind-foot, her red cap a-cock on her head, trotting along by the side of his vehicle, snorting with joy, and evidently bent on lavishing her pliant, serpentine, but leathery caresses upon his person.
His fear vanished in a moment. The animal’s intentions were certainly pacific, to put it mildly. He reflected that if he could keep his horse ahead of her, he could toll her around the block and back toward her tent. He had hardly guessed, as yet, the depth of the impression which he had made upon Zenobia’s heart, which must have been a large organ, if the size of her ears was any indication – according to the popular theory.
He was on the very edge of the town, and his road took him by a house where he had a new and highly valued patient, the young wife of old Deacon Burgee. Her malady being of a nature that permitted it, Mrs. Burgee was in the habit of sitting at her window when the Doctor made his rounds, and indicating the satisfactory state of her health by a bow and a smile. On this occasion she fled from the window with a shriek. Her mother, a formidable old lady under a red false-front, came to the window, shrieked likewise, and slammed down the sash.
The Doctor tolled his elephant around the block without further misadventure, and they started up the road toward Zenobia’s tent, Zenobia caressing her benefactor while shudders of antipathy ran over his frame. In a few minutes the keeper hove in sight. Zenobia saw him first, blew a shrill blast on her trumpet, close to the Doctor’s ear, bolted through a snake fence, lumbered across a turnip-field, and disappeared in a patch of woods, leaving the Doctor to quiet his excited horse and to face the keeper, who advanced with rage in his eye.
“What do you mean, you cuss,” he began, “weaning a man’s elephant’s affections away from him? You ain’t got no more morals than a Turk, you ain’t. That elephant an’ me has been side-partners for fourteen years, an’ here you come between us.”
“I don’t want your confounded elephant,” roared the Doctor; “why don’t you keep it chained up?”
“She busted her chain to git after you,” replied the keeper. “Oh, I seen you two lally-gaggin’ all along the road. I knowed you wa’n’t no good the first time I set eyes on yer, a-sayin’ hoodoo words over the poor dumb beast.”
The Doctor resolved to banish “analogy” from his vocabulary.
***
The next morning, about four o’clock, Dr. Tibbitt awoke with a troubled mind. He had driven home after midnight from a late call, and he had had an uneasy fancy that he saw a great shadowy bulk ambling along in the mist-hid fields by the roadside. He jumped out of bed and went to the window. Below him, completely covering Mrs. Pennypepper’s nasturtium bed, her prehensile trunk ravaging the early chrysanthemums, stood Zenobia, swaying to and fro, the dew glistening on her seamed sides beneath the early morning sunlight. The Doctor hastily dressed himself and slipped downstairs and out, to meet this Frankenstein’s-monster of affection.
There was but one thing to do. Zenobia would follow him wherever he went – she rushed madly through Mrs. Pennypepper’s roses to greet him – and his only course was to lead her out of the town before people began to get up, and to detain her in some remote meadow until he could get her keeper to come for her and secure her by force or stratagem. He set off by the least frequented streets, and he experienced a pang of horror as he remembered that his way led him past the house of his one professional rival in Sagawaug. Suppose Dr. Pettengill should be coming home or going out as he passed!
He did not meet Dr. Pettengill. He did meet Deacon Burgee, who stared at him with more of rage than of amazement in his wrinkled countenance. The Deacon was carrying a large bundle of embroidered linen and flannel, that must have been tied up in a hurry.
“Good morning, Deacon,” the Doctor hailed him, with as much ease of manner as he could assume. “How’s Mrs. Burgee?”
“She’s doin’ fust rate, no thanks to no circus doctors!” snorted the Deacon. “An’ if you want to know any thing further concernin’ her health, you ask Dr. Pettengill. He’s got more sense than to go trailin’ around the streets with a parboiled elephant behind him, a-frightening women-folks a hull month afore the’r time.”
“Why, Deacon!” cried the Doctor, “what – what is it?”
“It’s a boy,” responded the Deacon, sternly; “and it’s God’s own mercy that ’twa’n’t born with a trunk and a tail.”
***
The Doctor found a secluded pasture, near the woods that encircled the town, and there he sat him down, in the corner of a snake-fence, to wait until some farmer or market-gardener should pass by, to carry his message to the keeper. He had another message to send, too. He had several cases that must be attended to at once. Unless he could get away from his pachydermatous familiar, Pettengill must care for his cases that morning. It was hard – but what was he to do?
Zenobia stood by his side, dividing her attention between the caresses she bestowed on him and the care she was obliged to take of her red cap, which was not tightly strapped on, and slipped in various directions at every movement of her gigantic head. She was unmistakably happy. From time to time she trumpeted cheerily. She plucked up tufts of grass, and offered them to the Doctor. He refused them, and she ate them herself. Once he took a daisy from her, absent-mindedly, and she was so greatly pleased that she smashed his hat in her endeavors to pet him. The Doctor was a kind-hearted man. He had to admit that Zenobia meant well. He patted her trunk, and made matters worse. Her elephantine ecstasy came near being the death of him.
Still the farmer came not, nor the market-gardener. Dr. Tibbitt began to believe that he had chosen a meadow that was too secluded. At last two boys appeared. After they had stared at him and at Zenobia for half-an-hour, one of them agreed to produce Dr. Pettengill and Zenobia’s keeper for fifty cents. Dr. Pettengill was the first to arrive. He refused to come nearer than the furthest limit of the pasture.
“Hello, Doctor,” he called out, “hear you’ve been seeing elephants. Want me to take your cases? Guess I can. Got a half-hour free. Brought some bromide down for you, if you’d like to try it.”
To judge from his face, Zenobia was invisible. But his presence alarmed that sensitive animal. She crowded up close to the fence, and every time she flicked her skin to shake off the flies she endangered the equilibrium of the Doctor, who was sitting on the top rail, for dignity’s sake. He shouted his directions to his colleague, who shouted back professional criticisms.
“Salicylate of soda for that old woman? What’s the matter with salicylate of cinchonidia? Don’t want to kill her before you get out of this swamp, do you?”
Dr. Tibbitt was not a profane man; but at this moment he could not restrain himself.
“Damn you!” he said, with such vigor that the elephant gave a convulsive start. The Doctor felt his seat depart from under him – he was going – going into space for a brief moment, and then he scrambled up out of the soft mud of the cow-wallow back of the fence on which he had been sitting. Zenobia had backed against the fence.
The keeper arrived soon after. He had only reached the meadow when Zenobia lifted her trunk in the air, emitted a mirthful toot, and struck out for the woods with the picturesque and cumbersome gallop of a mastodon pup.
“Dern you,” said the keeper to Dr. Tibbitt, who was trying to fasten his collar, which had broken loose in his fall; “if the boys was here, and I hollered ‘Hey Rube!’ – there wouldn’t be enough left of yer to spread a plaster fer a baby’s bile!”
The Doctor made himself look as decent as the situation allowed, and then he marched toward the town with the light of a firm resolve illuminating his face. The literature of his childhood had come to his aid. He remembered the unkind tailor who pricked the elephant’s trunk. It seemed to him that the tailor was a rather good fellow.
“If that elephant’s disease is gratitude,” thought the Doctor, “I’ll give her an antidote.”
He went to the drug-store, and, as he went, he pulled out a blank pad and wrote down a prescription, from mere force of habit. It read thus:
When the druggist looked at it, he was taken short of breath.
“What’s this?” he asked – “a bombshell?”
“Put it up,” said the Doctor, “and don’t talk so much.” He lingered nervously on the druggist’s steps, looking up and down the street. He had sent a boy to order the stable-man to harness his gig. By-and-by, the druggist put his head out of the door.
“I’ve got some asafœtida pills,” he said, “that are kind o’ tired, and half a pound of whale-oil soap that’s higher’n Haman – “
“Put ’em in!” said the Doctor, grimly, as he saw Zenobia coming in sight far down the street.
She came up while the Doctor was waiting for the bolus. Twenty-three boys were watching them, although it was only seven o’clock in the morning.
“Down, Zenobia!” said the Doctor, thoughtlessly, as he might have addressed a dog. He was talking with the druggist, and Zenobia was patting his ear with her trunk. Zenobia sank to her knees. The Doctor did not notice her. She folded her trunk about him, lifted him to her back, rose, with a heave and a sway, to her feet, and started up the road. The boys cheered. The Doctor got off on the end of an elm-branch. His descent was watched from nineteen second-story windows.
His gig came to meet him at last, and he entered it and drove rapidly out of town, with Zenobia trotting contentedly behind him. As soon as he had passed Deacon Burgee’s house, he drew rein, and Zenobia approached, while his perspiring mare stood on her hind-legs.
“Zenobia – pill!” said the Doctor.
As she had often done in her late illness, Zenobia opened her mouth at the word of command, and swallowed the infernal bolus. Then they started up again, and the Doctor headed for Zenobia’s tent.
But Zenobia’s pace was sluggish. She had been dodging about the woods for two nights, and she was tired. When the Doctor whipped up, she seized the buggy by any convenient projection, and held it back. This damaged the buggy and frightened the horse; but it accomplished Zenobia’s end. It was eleven o’clock before Jake Bumgardner’s “Half-Way-House” loomed up white, afar down the dusty road, and the Doctor knew that his round-about way had at length brought him near to the field where the circus-tent had been pitched.
He drove on with a lighter heart in his bosom. He had not heard Zenobia behind him, for some time. He did not know what had become of her, or what she was doing, but he learned later.
The Doctor had compounded a pill well calculated to upset Zenobia’s stomach. That it would likewise give her a consuming thirst he had not considered. But chemistry was doing its duty without regard to him. A thirst like a furnace burned within Zenobia. Capsicum and chloride of lime were doing their work. She gasped and groaned. She searched for water. She filled her trunk at a wayside trough and poured the contents into her mouth. Then she sucked up a puddle or two. Then she came to Bumgardner’s, where a dozen kegs of lager-beer and a keg of what passed at Bumgardner’s for gin stood on the sidewalk. Zenobia’s circus experience had taught her what a water-barrel meant. She applied her knowledge. With her forefoot she deftly staved in the head of one keg after another, and with her trunk she drew up the beer and the gin, and delivered them to her stomach. If you think her taste at fault, remember the bolus.
Bumgardner rushed out and assailed her with a bung-starter. She turned upon him and squirted lager-beer over him until he was covered with an iridescent lather of foam from head to foot. Then she finished the kegs and went on her way, to overtake the Doctor.
***
The Doctor was speeding his mare merrily along, grateful for even a momentary relief from Zenobia’s attentions, when, at one and the same time, he heard a heavy, uncertain thumping on the road behind him, and the quick patter of a trotter’s hoofs on the road ahead of him. He glanced behind him first, and saw Zenobia. She swayed from side to side, more than was her wont. Her red cap was far down over her left eye. Her aspect was rakish, and her gait was unsteady. The Doctor did not know it, but Zenobia was drunk.
Zenobia was sick, but intoxication dominated her sickness. Even sulphide of calcium withdrew courteously before the might of beer and gin. Rocking from side to side, reeling across the road and back, trumpeting in imbecile inexpressive tones, Zenobia advanced.
The Doctor looked forward. Tom Matson sat in his dog-cart, with Miss Bunker by his side. His horse had caught sight of Zenobia, and he was rearing high in air, and whinnying in terror. Before Tom could pull him down, he made a sudden break, overturned the dog-cart, and flung Tom and Miss Minetta Bunker on a bank by the side of the road. It was a soft bank, well-grown with mint and stinging-nettles, just above a creek. Tom had scarce landed before he was up and off, running hard across the fields.
Miss Minetta rose and looked at him with fire in her eyes.
“Well!” she said aloud; “I’d like Mother to see you now!”
The Doctor had jumped out of his gig and let his little mare go galloping up the road. He had his arm about Miss Minetta’s waist when he turned to face his familiar demon – which may have accounted for the pluck in his face.
But Zenobia was a hundred yards down the road, and she was utterly incapable of getting any further. She trumpeted once or twice, then she wavered like a reed in the wind; her legs weakened under her, and she sank on her side. Her red cap had slipped down, and she picked it up with her trunk, broke its band in a reckless swing that resembled the wave of jovial farewell, gave one titanic hiccup, and fell asleep by the roadside.
***
An hour later, Dr. Tibbitt was driving toward Pelion, with Miss Bunker by his side. His horse had been stopped at the toll-gate. He was driving with one hand. Perhaps he needed the other to show how they could have a summer-house in the garden that ran down to the river.
***
But it was evening when Zenobia awoke to find her keeper sitting on her head. He jabbed a cotton-hook firmly and decisively into her ear, and led her homeward down the road lit by the golden sunset. That was the end of Zenobia’s infidelity.