One day last summer Mr. Sweeney left a large plate of fly-paper with
water on it in the window, hoping to gather in a few quarts of flies
in a deceased state. Dr. Mary Walker used to go to this window during
the afternoon and look out on the busy street while she called up
pleasant memories of her past life. That afternoon she thought she would
call up some more memories, so she went over on the counter and from
there jumped down on the window-sill, landing with all four feet in the
plate of fly-paper.
At first she regarded it as a joke, and treated the matter very lightly,
but later on she observed that the fly-paper stuck to her feet with
great tenacity of purpose. Those who have never seen the look of
surprise and deep sorrow that a cat wears when she finds herself glued
to a whole sheet of fly-paper, cannot fully appreciate the way Dr. Mary
Walker felt.
She did not dash wildly through a $150 plate-glass window, as some cats
would have done. She controlled herself and acted in the coolest manner,
though you could have seen that mentally she suffered intensely. She sat
down a moment to more fully outline a plan for the future. In doing so,
she made a great mistake. The gesture resulted in gluing the flypaper
to her person in such a way that the edge turned up behind in the most
abrupt manner, and caused her great inconvenience.
Some one at that time laughed in a coarse and heartless way, and I wish
you could have seen the look of pain that Dr. Mary Walker gave him.
[Illustration: 0063]
Then she went away. She did not go around the prescription case as the
rest of us did, but strolled through the middle of it, and so on out
through the glass door at the rear of the store. We did not see her go
through the glass door, but we found pieces of fly-paper and fur on the
ragged edges of a large aperture in the glass, and we kind of jumped at
the conclusion that Dr. Mary Walker had taken that direction in retiring
from the room.
Dr. Mary Walker never returned to St. Paul, and her exact whereabouts
are not known, though every effort was made to find her. Fragments of
fly-paper and brindle hair were found as far west as the Yellowstone
National Park, and as far north as the British line, but the doctor
herself was not found.
My own theory is, that if she turned her bow to the west so as to catch
the strong easterly gale on her quarter, with the sail she had set and
her tail pointing directly toward the zenith, the chances for Dr. Mary
Walker's immediate return are extremely slim.
THE HEYDAY OF LIFE.
There will always be a slight difference in the opinions of the young
and the mature, relative to the general plan on which the solar system
should be operated, no doubt. There are also points of disagreement in
other matters, and it looks as though there always would be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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