Famous Pets of Famous People
9781465676580
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Beautiful Edinburgh, her gray warmed into gold by the summer sunshine, lies half-asleep at the foot of her Castle Rock, and dreams, through the peaceful present, of her stormy, impetuous past. Each grain of dust there is historic. The traveler’s every footstep wakes some memory of old days. Over castle and palace, broad way and narrow close, over Canongate, Grassmarket, Arthur’s Seat, over hills that environ and streams that link, a magician has cast his spell—so intimately blending past and present, that we cannot look upon the one without remembering the other. To-day in sculptured marble, as erstwhile in life, the weaver of the spell yet guards his time-worn city, like the good genius of its fate. Passionless, mute, he sits brooding—the bustle of existence all around him—while the hound at his side gazes up at him, in rest unbroken as his own. The Scott monument—that is what rises before us; and the broad-browed, deep-eyed enchanter within, that—as every schoolboy knows—is the great Sir Walter Scott, the good, well-loving, dearly-loved Sir Walter. “What has he not done for every one of us?” writes the historian of Rab. “Who else ever, except Shakespeare, so diverted mankind, entertained and entertains a world so liberally, so wholesomely?” Who, indeed? And, in truth, we owe him far more than mere diversion, however liberal and wholesome; and may count it not least among his gifts to the world that, from the height of his fame, he set it example of a wise, distinguishing regard for animals. “He prayeth well who loveth well Both man and bird and beast”— might stand for the motto of his life. From babyhood to old age the power of loving enriched him, and won from “all things, great or small,” a warm response. The most conversible, attachable, and hence, dearest, among his humble friends were, naturally, horses and dogs. He liked, however, almost everything that breathes; and poultry, cattle, sheep, or pigs, cats and birds—all shared, to greater or less degree, in his good-will. An old gray badger lived, hermit-like, in a hole near Abbotsford for many years under his protection. A hen and a pig formed ardent attachments to him; and a pair of little donkeys would trot like puppies at his heels whenever they got the chance. Carlyle tells the story of a Blenheim cocker in Edinburgh, the most timid and reserved of its race, which shrank from all attention save that of its mistress, until one day on the street it made a sudden spring towards a tall, halting stranger, and fawned upon him in an ecstasy of delight. This was, of course, our own Sir Walter, whose great heart, like a magnet, drew to it all other hearts, whether bold or shy.
