This four-legged guest had made that thing adored of men, “a record,” and it was for killing rats. Now you show me a dog with a record for killing rats, and I’ll show you a dog who has broken the record killing cats. It’s perfectly natural; he has to kill the cats or there would not be rats enough to make a record with.
Bolivar was graciously received by Marie, who knew but little of dogs, and who asked “why he bit his own back when everybody’s legs were in his reach,” adding, “If I was a dog I’d bite somebody else every time;” which was pure and unadulterated truth, I’m sure.
In the forenoon of that day, “Tyler’s pretty devil” had favored us with one of her wildest tantrums. The servant, Norah, had spilled a little hot tea over Dinah’s foot, and Marie had gone into a very frenzy of rage. Seizing Dinah by the legs, she had thrashed the girl out of the room and the house; had with one sweep of Dinah’s body cleared a small table of every article it held; had cut her own hand; had held her breath until she was blue; had indeed furnished her whole family with healthy but rather unpleasant exercise for both mind and body, and when she had so stirred her monkeys up that we each chattered our teeth while we swang madly from our own particular pole, she had suddenly calmed down and requested me to bandage Dinah’s scalded foot, and proceed with her to the garden, there to play “sick lady in the country.”
By some chance there had sprung up, at the very foot of the garden, a large weed, a most uncommon growth amid such surroundings; a great, big, coarse-leafed, pinkish-topped thing, a sort of pretty tramp from the woods or fields; I think it’s called milk-weed, though to Dinah it was usually an orange orchard, while only occasionally it became a pine forest in which we lost ourselves and endured great hardships.
I remember it was an orange orchard that day, and after a long play, when Marie was called to dress for dinner, she advised Dinah to remain where she was, saying, “When dinner is over I’ll bring you some dessert.”
So I gave Dinah a book to read, and we left her. We both looked back, Marie many times, and always kissing her hand. And so I most often see her in my memory, the “peshous one,” I mean, sitting stiffly against the trunk of her orange tree, one foot bandaged (without the formality of first removing her boot), an open almanac on her lap, whose piteous, gray, old jokes were to entertain her during our absence, her water-waves trim and neat, her round eye mild and pleasant, her smile almost meeting behind--so I saw her that last day.