Baby was still asleep in the corner.It would not be safe to remove him until the lodgers had gone down town; and I was revolving in my mind the expediency of keeping him until night veiled his obtrusive eccentricity from the public eye, when there came a cautious tap at my door.I opened it.Mrs.Brown slipped in quietly, closed the door softly, stood with her back against it, and her hand on the knob, and beckoned me mysteriously towards her.
Then she asked in a low voice,--
"Is hair-dye poisonous?"
I was too confounded to speak.
"Oh, do! you know what I mean," she said impatiently."This stuff." She produced suddenly from behind her a bottle with a Greek label so long as to run two or three times spirally around it from top to bottom."He says it isn't a dye: it's a vegetable preparation, for invigorating"--"Who says?" I asked despairingly.
"Why, Mr.Parker, of course!" said Mrs.Brown severely, with the air of having repeated the name a great many times,--"the old gentleman in the room above.The ****** question I want to ask,"she continued with the calm manner of one who has just convicted another of gross ambiguity of language, "is only this: If some of this stuff were put in a saucer, and left carelessly on the table, and a child, or a baby, or a cat, or any young animal, should come in at the window, and drink it up,--a whole saucer full,--because it had a sweet taste, would it be likely to hurt them?"I cast an anxious glance at Baby, sleeping peacefully in the corner, and a very grateful one at Mrs.Brown, and said I didn't think it would.
"Because," said Mrs.Brown loftily as she opened the door, "Ithought, if it was poisonous, remedies might be used in time.
Because," she added suddenly, abandoning her lofty manner, and wildly rushing to the corner with a frantic embrace of the unconscious Baby, "because, if any nasty stuff should turn its booful hair a horrid green, or a naughty pink, it would break its own muzzer's heart, it would!"But, before I could assure Mrs.Brown of the inefficiency of hair-dye as an internal application, she had darted from the room.
That night, with the secrecy of defaulters, Baby and I decamped from Mrs.Brown's.Distrusting the too emotional nature of that noble animal, the horse, I had recourse to a handcart, drawn by a stout Irishman, to convey my charge to the ferry.Even then, Baby refused to go, unless I walked by the cart, and at times rode in it.
"I wish," said Mrs.Brown, as she stood by the door, wrapped in an immense shawl, and saw us depart, "I wish it looked less solemn,--less like a pauper's funeral."
I must admit, that, as I walked by the cart that night, I felt very much as if I were accompanying the remains of some humble friend to his last resting-place; and that, when I was obliged to ride in it, I never could entirely convince myself that I was not helplessly overcome by liquor, or the victim of an accident, en route to the hospital.But at last we reached the ferry.On the boat, I think no one discovered Baby, except a drunken man, who approached me to ask for a light for his cigar, but who suddenly dropped it, and fled in dismay to the gentlemen's cabin, where his incoherent ravings were luckily taken for the earlier indications of delirium tremens.
It was nearly midnight when I reached my little cottage on the outskirts of Oakland; and it was with a feeling of relief and security that I entered, locked the door, and turned him loose in the hall, satisfied that henceforward his depredations would be limited to my own property.He was very quiet that night; and after he had tried to mount the hatrack, under the mistaken impression that it was intended for his own gymnastic exercise, and knocked all the hats off, he went peaceably to sleep on the rug.
In a week, with the exercise afforded him by the run of a large, carefully-boarded enclosure, he recovered his health, strength, spirits, and much of his former beauty.His presence was unknown to my neighbors, although it was noticeable that horses invariably "shied" in passing to the windward of my house, and that the baker and milkman had great difficulty in the delivery of their wares in the morning, and indulged in unseemly and unnecessary profanity in so doing.
At the end of the week, I determined to invite a few friends to see the Baby, and to that purpose wrote a number of formal invitations.