Completely under his
claw!
No more work, no more leisure, no more music or tennis; my life career,
my sphere, was definitely settled. I was Kizzie's attendant--nothing
more. People have cared for rather odd pets, as the leeches tamed and
trained by Lord Erskine; others have been deeply interested in toads,
crickets, mice, lizards, alligators, tortoises, and monkeys. Wolsey was
on familiar terms with a venerable carp; Clive owned a pet tortoise; Sir
John Lubbock contrived to win the affections of a Syrian wasp; Charles
Dudley Warner devoted an entire article in the Atlantic Monthly to the
praises of his cat Calvin; but did you ever hear of a peacock as a
household pet?
As it is the correct thing now to lie down all of a summer afternoon,
hidden by trees, and closely watch every movement of a pair of little
birds, or spend hours by a frog pond studying the sluggish life there,
and as mothers are urged by scientific students to record daily the
development of their infants in each apparently unimportant matter, I
think I may be excused for a brief sketch of my charge, for no mother
ever had a child so precocious, so wise, so willful, so affectionate, so
persistent, as Kizzie
at the same age. Before he was three days old,
he would follow me like a dog up and down stairs and all over the house,
walk behind me as I strolled about the grounds, and when tired, he would
cry and "peep, weep" for me to sit down. Then he would beg to be taken
on my lap, thence he would proceed to my arm, then my neck, where he
would peck and scream and flutter, determined to nestle there for a nap.
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