Benjy comes and sits most mournfully
facing me when I settle down on a sunny morning, such as this, to write:
and inquires, with all the dumbness a dog is capable of--"What has come
between us, that you fill up your time and mine with those cat's-claw
scratchings, when you should be in your woodland dress running [with] me
through damp places?"
Having written this sentimental meaning into his eyes, and Benjy still
sitting watching me, I was seized with ruth for my neglect of him, and
took him to see his mother's grave. At the bottom of the long walk is our
dog's cemetery:--no tombstones, but mounds; and a dog-rose grows there and
flourishes as nowhere else. It was my fancy as a child to have it planted:
and I declare to you, it has taken wonderfully to the notion, as if it
_knew_ that it had relations of a higher species under its keeping. Benjy,
too, has a profound air of knowing, and never scratches for bones there,
as he does in other places. What horror, were I to find him digging up his
mother's skeleton! Would my esteem for him survive?
When we got there to-day, he deprecated my choice of locality, asking
what I had brought him _there_ for. I pointed out to him the precise
mound which covered the object of his earliest affections, and gathered
you these buds. Are they not a deep color for wild ones?--if their blush
remains a fixed state till the post brings them to you.
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