Again and again I have tried to make a pet of the cockroach, for I believe under his natural distrust he has an affectionate nature. But some hostile servant has invariably undone my work. The only roach I succeeded in taming was hardly a pet, because he used to hide with the others half the time when he saw me, and once in a fit of resentment he bit a hole in my shoe. Still, he sometimes used to come at my call when I brought him warm tea. Poor fellow! poor Logan!--as I called him. He had a difficult life. I think he was slightly dyspeptic. Perhaps the tea was not good for him. He used to run about uttering low, nervous moans before moulting; and when his time came to mate, I thought he never would find the right doe. How well I remember my thrill when he picked one at last, and when I knew that I was about to see their nuptial flight. Higher and higher they circled over the clean blue linoleum, with their short wings going so fast they fairly crackled, till the air was electric: and then, swirling over the dresser, their great moment came. Unhappily, Logan, with his usual bad luck, bumped the bread-box. The doe, with a shrill, morose whistle, went and laid on the floor; but Logan seemed too balked to pursue her. His flight was a failure.
He rapidly grew old after this, and used to keep by himself. He also got into the habit of roaming around outdoors at night. Hated to see other roaches mating by the bread-box, perhaps. As he was too big to crawl back in under the door when we shut it, he was sometimes locked out when he roamed, and had to wait until morning. This in the end caused his death. One winter evening, blocked at the door, he climbed the fire-escape and tried to get in the bathroom window. But it chanced to be shut. He hung there all night, barking hoarsely--and I heard him, but never thought it was Logan. When I went to look at the thermometer in the morning, there he lay in the snow.
Elsie has just got back from an expedition to the Sea Islands. She had had her eye on those islands for a long time, she tells me. They lie off the coast of South Carolina, out of the way of all traffic, and they looked to her like a good hunting ground for African folk-lore. Her ethnological field-work is always taking her off to such places. I suppose that that Englishman, Selous, used to go around studying maps, and questioning natives about the best jungles for lions, in much the same way that Elsie constantly studies our continent, looking for some corner of it that might interest an intelligent person. The parts that are civilization to us, are mere jungle to her: the houses and street cars are like underbrush that she must push through, to get to the places where her quarry is, and where she really wakes up. In between, she lives in New York with us,--she has to,--and conforms to our ways, or to most of them anyhow, just as Stefansson does with the Eskimos: she wears the usual tribal adornments, and beadwork, and skins; she's as dazzling as any other beauty, in her box at the opera; and she sleeps and eats in the family's big stone igloo near Fifth Avenue. An unobservant citizen might almost suppose she was one of us. But every now and then her neglect of some small ceremonial sets our whole tribe to chattering about her, and eyeing her closely, and nodding their hairy coiffures or their tall shiny hats, whispering around their lodge-fires, evenings, that Elsie is queer.