Читать книгу Dogtown. Being Some Chapters from the Annals of the Waddles Family Set Down in the Language of Housepeople онлайн

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Now Aunt Prue was one of those ladies who prefer indoors to outdoors, and cats to dogs. The “Fireside Sphinx” has many virtues, and its rights should be respected, only it is a very strange thing that people who love cats cannot seem to fully appreciate dogs, which of course are the superior animals.

One day, a couple of years before this time, when Lumberlegs, the St. Bernard, then an awkward pup, was a new arrival, and the Widow Dog Lily, who had been rescued from starving by Miss Jule, had been adopted by Tommy and become his guardian, Aunt Prue had come unexpectedly to pay her brother, Anne’s father, a visit.

She had not intended to arrive unannounced, for she liked to be met by the best go-to-meeting surrey and pair. But travelling and even planning for it always flustered her; and when she wrote to tell of her plans, after spoiling three sheets of paper, she directed the letter to another brother in Texas. Consequently, when she arrived at the Woodlands station at noon of a blazing July day,—she always took midday trains, it’s apt to thunder in the afternoon,—there was no one there to meet her. “No, marm, no hacks here to-day,” said the station master in answer to her request for one; “no use in ’phoning the stable either, all the teams here about have gone to the Sunday-school picnic, and I reckon the only folks to home is dogs.” So saying he banged down his office window and drifted across the road to dinner.