Witty as Horatius Flaccus,
As great a Jacobin as Gracchus,
Short, though not as fat as Bacchus,
Riding on a little jackass.”
Before saying good-bye to the donkey I must give the appeal of Mr.
Evarts’s little daughter at their summer home in Windsor, Vermont, to
her learned and judicial father; so naïve and irresistible:
“DEAR PAPA: Do come home soon. The donkey is so lonesome without
you!”
I once heard Mr. Evarts lamenting to Chief-Justice Chase that he had
been badly beaten at a game of High Low Jack by Ben, the learned pig. “I
know now,” said he, “why two pipes are called a hog’s head. It is on
account of their great capacity!”
One would fancy that a busy lawyer would have no time to give to pets,
but this is far from true. Burnet, in his life of Sir Matthew Hale, the
most eminent lawyer in the time of Charles I and Cromwell, says of him,
that “his mercifulness extended even to his beasts, for when the horses
that he had kept long grew old, he would not suffer them to be sold or
much wrought, but ordered his man to turn them loose on his grounds and
put them only to easy work, such as going to market and the like. He
used old dogs also with the same care; his shepherd having one that was
blind with age, he intended to have killed or lost him, but the judge
coming to hear of it made one of his servants bring him home and feed
him till he died. And he was scarce ever seen more angry than with one
of his servants for neglecting a bird that he kept so that it died for
want of food.”
Daniel Webster’s fondness for animals is well known. When his friends
visited him at Marshfield the first excursion they must take would be to
his barns and pastures, where he would point out the beauties of an
Alderney, and mention the number of quarts she gave daily, with all a
farmer’s pride, adding, “I know, for I measured it myself.” Choate used
to tell a story _à propos_ of this. Once, when spending the Sabbath at
Marshfield, he went to his room after breakfast to read. Soon there came
an authoritative knock at the door, and Mr. Webster shouted, “What are
you doing, Choate?” He replied, “I’m reading.” “Oh,” said Webster, “come
down and see the pigs.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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