CHAPTER IX A NAKED SCUTTERER.

THE next morning was one of those days that sometimes come in the summer, when the most desirable thing to do is to sleep. The air was soft and damp, and sleep inviting, and when something awoke me at six o’clock, I drowsily looked at my watch and dreamily realized that I was not compelled to catch any train, but could sink into delightful unconsciousness once more.

Just what had waked me I did not know, but before I went off again I heard the voice of James out doors, and then I heard the voice of Minerva, evidently at her open window, saying:

“I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

And then I dropped off, to be awakened again in what seemed like a moment by these beautiful words:
“Oh, de debbil he t’ought he had me fas’.
Le’ my people go.
But I t’ought I’d break his chains at las’,
Le’ my people go.
Go down Moses, way down in Egypt la-an’,
Tell ol’ Phar’o’ fo’ to le’ my people go.”

It was melodious, it was harmonious, but it was also six o’clock in the morning.

“Oh, won’t they stop,” said Ethel, sleepily.

“Not by my command,” said I. “They are practising for the concert.”

“Oh, I’m so sleepy! What time is it?”
“Oh, ’twas a dark an’ stormy night,
Le’ my people go;
When Moses an’ the Israelite,
Le’ my people go.”

“Make them go,” said Ethel, her eyes wide open, but her mouth passing from the words to a yawn.

“And it’s such a beautiful morning to sleep,” said I.

But as verse after verse rolled out sonorously, sleep fled from the room in dismay, and we followed, and for the first time since we had come to the country, found ourselves as one might say, up before breakfast. The morning air was delightful, but we knew the danger that lurks in morning air on empty stomachs—or we thought we knew it. If there is no danger in such exposures I make my humble apology to those who hold the contrary opinion. Personally I do not know what is right to do—that is, hygienically right to do, at any given moment.

May I be forgiven for digressing at this point, in order that I may touch on a topic that has been near my heart for a long time, but has never had a chance for utterance before. I was brought up to believe that water with meals was a very bad thing, so I went without water at meals, and thrived like a green bay tree.

One day a doctor told me that water with meals was the one thing needed to bring out the tonic properties of food.

I immediately began to drink water with my meals in perfect trust and confidence, and—I continued to thrive like a green bay tree.

When I was a boy, I was told that tomatoes were exceedingly bad; that they had no nutritive qualities, and that it was but a few short years since they had been called “love apples” and had rightly been considered poisonous.

With unquestioning faith I refrained from eating the juicy vegetables and remained free from all the diseases that follow in their train. I had not tasted a tomato, and I did not know what I was losing.

One day when feeling a little off my feed, a young doctor friend said, “What you need is the acid of a tomato.”

With an unfaltering trust I approached a tomato and ate it and realized the many, many years that were irrevocably gone; years in which I might have eaten the succulent fruit—for a tomato is a fruit; there’s no question of it.

After that day I made a point of eating tomatoes whenever I could and I remained free from the diseases that had been said to follow in their train.

I blindly follow the dictum of the last doctor who speaks and it is to that fact that I attribute my good health.

I read somewhere not long since that the best way to keep free from colds was to sit in draughts as much as possible and I believe there is a good deal of sound sense back of that dictum, but Ethel will not let me try the virtue of the thing.

No doctor has told me that it is right to take long walks on an early morning empty stomach and so I have not done it, but I have an English friend who used to walk twenty miles or so to breakfast. The English are always walking twenty miles to somewhere, and look at them. A fine race!

The Americans are not much given to walking, but look at them—a fine race!

Everything is certainly for the best—always, everywhere.

We walked around to the kitchen and found Minerva on her knees before the fire watching insufficient kindling feebly burn while James sat on the kitchen table swinging one long leg and teaching her a rag-time melody.

He rose to his feet as we came in and gave us a hearty good morning and then burst into a good-natured laugh that showed all his beautiful white teeth.

“Made an early start, sir.”

“Yes, James. It isn’t absolutely necessary for rehearsals to begin quite so early,” said I. “It woke us up.”

“There, now, Minerva, what did I tell you? I was sure they’d hear it.”

“No question about your filling the church.”

“’Deed I’m awful sorry,” said Minerva, “Wakin’ you so early, an’ the fire not kindled.”

“Well, never mind. We’ll drink some milk and then we’ll go for a little walk, but I think that to-morrow perhaps the rehearsals needn’t begin until after breakfast. There’ll be a long morning before you and you can rehearse in the morning and take the nature study in the afternoon.”

“Yas’r,” said Minerva, a shade of reluctance in her tone which I attributed to the mention of nature study. Minerva evidently wanted life to be one grand sweet song.

All that morning snatches of melody floated over the landscape in the which landscape we were idly lolling under the trees reading, and I think that household duties were neglected, but that James was not averse to work was shown by the fact that he carried great armfuls of kindling wood into the kitchen.

When Ethel went out there just before lunch she found the west window banked up to the second sash with kindling wood.

Ethel likes to have the whole house in ship shape order, and this unsightly pile of wood in the kitchen went against the grain. There was enough there to last a week and meantime the kitchen was robbed of that much daylight.

James sat on the door-sill idly whittling a piece of kindling and Minerva, temporarily songless, was getting lunch ready.

“Oh, James,” said Ethel after a rapid survey of the situation, “I wish if you haven’t anything else to do that you would pile that kindling wood out in the woodshed.”

She told me he burst into his hearty laugh, and, rising with alacrity, he said:

“Certainly, Mrs. Vernon,” and for the next half hour he was busily employed in undoing what he had done in the half hour before.

“Oh, it will be easy to find employment for him along those lines,” said I when she told me. “We’ll just make him do things and undo them and that laugh of his will keep Minerva sweet natured and he’ll earn his wages over and over again.”

“Well, it seems sort of wicked to make a human being do unnecessary things just for the sake of making him undo them again,” said my mistress of economics.

“In cases like that the end justifies the means.”

After lunch that day Ethel interrogated Minerva as to her feelings.

“Oh, Mis. Vernon, James is like human folks to me. He’s in a way different from you an’ Mist. Vernon.”

“Do you mean you think he’s better?” said Ethel, more to draw Minerva out than for any other reason.

“No, but he’s more folksy. You an’ Mist. Vernon, after all’s said an’ done, is white. It ain’t dat he’s kinder dan you, but he’s more my kind. My, he’d be lovely in de city.”

Minerva sighed.

“Minerva, don’t think about the city, you wouldn’t have such a chance to sing together in the city as you have here. I couldn’t get up such a concert as this is going to be in the city, but up here you have just that much more freedom.”

“Minerva,” continued Ethel, “You needn’t scrub the kitchen floor this afternoon. I want you and James to join a little school that I am going to get up.”

“Never did like school,” said Minerva.

“Well,” said Ethel, feeling that she had approached the subject in the wrong way, “I don’t mean a school where you have to sit in a stuffy room and do sums on a board and learn to read and write. I mean that we are going out into the woods to learn something about the denizens of the woods and fields.”

“Yas’m,” said Minerva.

Minerva was an emotional being. There was never any doubt of that. I think it was the next day that Ethel and I were returning from a walk and we saw James leave the kitchen and go around to the front of the house as if he were looking for some one.

When he saw us he said:

“Have you seen Minerva?”

We told him we had not, but just then we all saw her coming out of the woodshed with a handful of kindlings, her cat, still somewhat sticky, perched on her shoulder.

She entered the kitchen and I was just about to ask James a question about the Hurlbert Home when the now familiar shrieking voice of Minerva came to us through the open kitchen window.

“Ow, ow, take it away. Ow, I’m bitten.”

Ethel, alarmed, started for the house. I, nonplussed, stood still. James burst out laughing.

A moment later Minerva came running out of the front door, her apron over her head.

“What is it, Minerva?” said Ethel, taking hold of her and uncovering her face.

“Ow, Mis. Vernon, dere’s der stranges’ animal in the kitchen. Tain’t a dog an’ it has a mouth like hinges, an’ I’m afraid it’ll eat Miss Pussy up.”

“What a child you are, Minerva,” said Ethel. “There’s no animal there. I’m sure of it.”

“Let’s see what it is,” said I, and turned to speak to James, but he had disappeared.

I could hear his hearty voice shattering the air with laughter, but I could not see him.

“Come, we’ll go in and see this beast,” said I. “Perhaps it’s a rat.”

“’Deed it ain’t a rat. I ain’t agoin’ in. It’s scutterin’ all over de place, an’ it’s stark naked.”

Scuttering all over the place and stark naked. A light burst on me.

Ethel and I went in hand in hand, because her hand sought mine. I can not say that I was afraid.

When we reached the sitting room we could hear the scuttering together with other noises that were not pleasant, and I realized that to metropolitan Minerva the animal must be very terrifying if, indeed, he proved to be what I thought he was.

Minerva had evidently slammed the kitchen door after her, for it was shut.

I opened it and the stark naked scutterer turned out to be a little pig not much bigger than Miss Pussy and as pink and nude as Venus rising from the sea.

The little chap was frantic and he rushed through the dining room into the sitting room and thence to the front porch.

Minerva had been standing there wringing her hands, with her back to the house. It therefore happened that she did not see the innocent little porker coming. His only idea was to get out of doors and away, but he blundered in doing so, for he ran plump into Minerva, who sat down on him as promptly and then in her agitation she rolled off the front steps to the front path, and the squealing piggy, freeing himself from her skirts, ran off down the road.

“Ow, he’s bit me. He’s bit me,” said Minerva, sitting up in the path and rubbing her knee.

I am not entirely at home in natural history, but I do not think it is the habit of little pigs to bite, and I told Minerva so, but she insisted that she was bitten, and nothing would calm her until Mrs. Ethel took her into the kitchen and satisfied her that she had not been bitten at all.

Minerva’s plight had its funny side, and James evidently thought so, for he now came into view and said,

“She’s the most fidgety girl I ever saw. I brought her a present of a little pig and left it in the kitchen for her, and the pig has never been away from its mother before, and it was most as much frightened as Minerva was.”

“What she needs is lessons in natural history, James. The other day she mistook a cow for a bear, and the only animals she seems to know are horses and dogs and cats.”

“I guess I’ll go get that pig,” said James. We could hear the little animal squealing. It was running madly around in the lower lot.

“I’ll help you, James.”

Afterwards I was sorry I had said I would help James. I had never chased a pig before, and I did not know they could cover ground so quickly or so unexpectedly. Twice I was bowled over in my efforts to grab the slippery beast, and by the time that he was caught I was winded and perspiring.

“I’ll take it into the kitchen and show it to Minerva and tell her how it happened,” said James.

“Yes, do,” said I. “The only way to get her broken to pigs is to show her that they do not intend any harm.”

We went into the kitchen and found her laughing hysterically, while Ethel was picking up pieces of crockery that decorated the floor. It seems that the lunch dishes were piled up preparatory to washing them and piggy had run against the leg of the table and dislodged them with destructive effect.

James entered the kitchen, holding the pig clasped to his ample chest.

“There, Minerva, you see the animal is perfectly harmless.”

“My, my, I never did see such a mouth,” said she.

Ethel does not like to touch strange animals, but she wished to show Minerva how perfectly innocuous this little piggy was, and so she stroked its pink little snout and the next instant the little fellow had her finger in its mouth and sucked it as if it were a stick of candy.

This at first frightened Minerva and it did not please my fastidious wife, but for the sake of the object lesson she said:

“Now, you see, Minerva, this pig is even more harmless than a cat, for a cat has claws and this pig has only—”

Alas, for Ethel. The pig showed what it could do by inserting its pearly teeth in her finger.

She snatched her hand away in a moment, but Minerva’s confidence in pigs had been so lessened that we told James that he would better take his gift elsewhere.

For my part I was not sorry to see the shiny little creature go. Pigs have never appealed to me as household pets. My ancestors came from England.