And since the soldiers we have written about wanted toys, like sick children, their mascot to hug--here comes a procession of our little fur folk walking vividly before your mental eye.
Here is Loki, the first and oldest of the pets. Loki, growing grey about the muzzle, elderly already by reason of his six years of life; with his immense coat, tawny, tufted, plumed, fringed; with his consequential gait; his “quangley” ways: so easily offended, in his own strong sense of dignity; with his over-loving heart; his half-human, half-lion eyes; Loki, with his clockwork regularity of habit; his disdainful oblivion, except on certain rare occasions, of the smaller fur fry; Loki, making windmill paws to the Master of the Villino, till he has succeeded in dragging him away from his pipe and his arm-chair for a walk on the moors; or yet frantically and mutely imploring the mystified visitor to go away and cease from boring him.
And here is Mimosa, the most Chinese of little ladies, hued like a ripe chestnut, with dark orbs so immense and protuberant as almost to seem to justify the legend that Pekinese will drop their eyes about if you don’t take care. Very sleek and sinuous and small is she, a creature of moods and freaks, fastidious to the point of never accepting a meal with the other dogs; with all kinds of tricksy, pretty ways of play, shrilly barking and dancing for bread pills, which she will fling in the air and catch again, throw over her shoulder and waltz round to pounce upon, more like a kitten than a little dog.
And the puppy, Loki’s own contemned daughter, the colour of a young lion cub--the puppy, with her irrepressible enthusiasms, her unsnubbable demonstrations, her “pretty paws,” her coal-black muzzle, her innocent countenance--“Plain Eliza”--whose heart, like her father’s, is so much too big and tender and faithful, that happening the other day to see, over the garden hedge, a member of the family in whose house she was born, she rent the air with such shrieks of ecstasy that the whole Villino establishment rushed to the spot, thinking she was being murdered.
Then there is Arabella, the lavrock setter. “Perverse, precise, unseasonable Pamela,” cries Mr. B. in Richardson’s celebrated novel, when having pursued the virtuous damsel to her last refuge, she not unnaturally misunderstands the purport of his next advance.