I touched reverently the half-worn band of leather, remembering how near it had once lain to a faithful little heart. “They tried to get his body from me,” continued Bobby’s friend, “that they might stuff the skin, and keep it in the museum. But I said to myself, ‘No, sirs; you mean it well, but it ain’t what Bobby ‘d ‘a’ wanted, and he’s the first call to be axed.’ I meant to do the fair thing by him, dead or alive. He’d never ‘a’ lain here thirteen year, wet weather or dry, cold or warm, summer and winter, unless he’d meant it. You see, ma’am, I naturally knew it wa’n’t right for his skin to be that far from his master’s; so when he died, I just quietly took my own way, and got him under ground before them as wanted him knew rightly he was dead. And there he is,”--pointing to the flower-bed--“all that’s left of him.” A soft Scotch rain had been falling while we talked, but now slackened; and a misty beam of sunlight pierced the clouds low-piled in the west. Its pale gold lit up Bobby’s resting-place, under-scoring, as it were, the epitaph just spoken, then glanced along the gray front of the church, and brought into relief an ancient slab, where a skeleton, fantastically poised, appeared to be keeping guard. A little robin hopped lightly to a bush in the flower-bed, whence soon its clear vespers thrilled the air. Death was there, alas! yet overcome by life; since love is the only real life, and by right of loving Bobby lives forever. _II._ _A SELECT COMPANY._ II. A SELECT COMPANY. In the Life and Correspondence of the Rev. Lyman Beecher, under the far-away date of 1819, is this item: “Last week was interred Tom junior, with funeral honors, by the side of old Tom of happy memory. What a fatal mortality there is among the cats of the Parsonage! Our Harriet is chief mourner always at their funerals. She asked for what she called an epithet for the gravestone of Tom junior, which I gave as follows: ‘Here lies our kit, Who had a fit, And acted queer. Shot with a gun, Her race is run, And she lies here.’” The small mourner at this small funeral has since then had many a pet to love and mourn. Hardly a child but knows the dogs whose stories were told in Our Young Folks some twenty years ago: Carlo, the poor, good, homely, loving mastiff; the Newfoundland Rover, who, like Christopher North’s Brontë, met a cruel death by poison; Stromion, the ‘pure mongrel,’ Prince and Giglio; lady-like Florence; Rag, the Skye, and Wix, the Scotch terrier; all these are familiar names. Then, too, there were cats, as we have just seen; there were birds; there were accidental, happen-so pets; and, in fine, when we think of Harriet Beecher Stowe, it is not only as the friend of her race, but also as the friend and advocate of the great world of animals all around us.