But I was going to speak more in particular about Mr. Sweeney's cat. Mr.
Sweeney had a large cat, named Dr. Mary Walker, of which he was very fond.
Dr. Mary Walker remained at the drug store all the time, and was known all
over St. Paul as a quiet and reserved cat. If Dr. Mary Walker took in the
town after office hours, nobody seemed to know anything about it. She
would be around bright and cheerful the next morning and attend to her
duties at the store just as though nothing whatever had happened.
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 glueing the fly-paper to her
person in such a way that the edge turned up behind in the most abrupt
manner, and caused her great inconvenience.
[Illustration: AT FIRST SHE REGARDED IT AS A JOKE.]
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.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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