Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

high-priced farm land the importance of a small flock of sheep cannot be overlooked.

In addition to pointing out these facts the bulletin already mentioned, "The Sheep-Killing Dog," discusses the possible means of preventing in the future the loss from dogs. At the present time the various State laws on this subject diere widely, some States using the money obtained from dog licenses to reimburse sheep owners, while others permit the sheep men to recover damages from the dog owners and two offer them no recourse whatsoever. Dogs, however, are very seldom caught in the act of killing sheep. It is always difficult to determine their owners, and where the damages are paid by the State directly from the dog-tax funds, the money very frequently is far from sufficient to meet all the claims.

owners. A special license should be issued for kennels where large numbers of dogs are maintained under such conditions that they cannot possibly do any harm to neighboring flocks.

Whle some such plan as this is probably indispensable to the full development of the sheep industry in the United States, there are cases where the flock master will find in its absence the use of dog-proof fences very desirable. The grazing of sheep upon comparatively small areas of land sown to forage crops, instead of upon permanent pastures in larger fields, materially reduces the area to be fenced and makes this a practicable precaution. In the West fences have been built which prove a satisfactory defence against coyotes, and the fence that will turn aside a coyote will turn a dog. A fence of this character can be built as follows:

A remedy that is suggested for this situation is a uniform State dog law embodying the principle of a tax upon dogs sufficiently heavy to discourage. those who are not willing to take care of their pets from keeping them. Under this plan all dogs over six months of age must be licensed each year, the tax paid at the time of licensing and a metal tag bearing the license number attached to the dog's collar. Any dog found without this tag, unattended and off its owner's premises, may be killed. When found unattended on a farm where sheep are kept the dog may be killed whether it has the tag or not, and under any circumstances a dog caught chasing or killing sheep may be killed. All dogs which can be proved to be sheep killers must be killed whether caught in the act or not, and a reward of $15 should be offered for any one identifying a sheep-killing dog. The money received from dog taxes should be devoted to reimbursing sheep owners for their lost stock and the county should in turn recover this money whenever possible from the dog's fensing on a large scale.

Posts 7 1-2 feet in length, set 2 1-2 feet in the ground and 16 feet apart; a barbed wire stretched flat to the surface of the ground; 3 inches higher a 36-inch woven wire fence having a 4-inch trangular mesh; 5 inches higher a barbed wire; 6 inches higher a second barbed wire; 7 inches above this a third barbed wire. Total height 57 inches.

It is important to remember, however, that the bottom strand of barbed wire must be stretched flat on the surface of the ground at all point. If necessary the ground should be graded before the fence is built. Thereafter such small holes as appear may be filled in. It is not always necessary to fence the entire pasture, for dogs usually attack sheep at night only. If a sufficient area can be fenced to give the flock protection during the night, therefore, they may be safely left in uninclosed pastures through the day. This method involves certain loss of time in driving the sheep to and from the inclosure, but in many cases will be preferred to the expense of

The Romantic Adventures of an Enthusiastic

Young Pessimist

By ROWLAND THOMAS

CHAPTER XXI

Fancies

Quiet days drift by and bear me on their placid current, unresisting and unquestioning.

If ever I have a misgiving, a momentary doubt that they cannot go on forever, that my existence is purposeless and idle and leads me toward no end, though an end is set for every life, sensuous comfort smothers it before it finds articulate voice. For if I am doing nothing, I at least am harming no one and no thing, and to walk harmless and undisturbing through the crowded world seems to me no vain achievement in itself. There are days behind me when I walked in the heedlessness of young strength, and I still remember the faces and voices of some whom I jostled. But now no fellow-wayfarer finds his road harder for my crowding, and the thought of that is no small part of my comfort on the rare occasions when my musings soar to the sublime and sterile heights of a transcendental ethic.

That Don Feliciano seems to find nothing unnatural in my way of living is, perhaps, a less illusive reason for my passive satisfaction. For I have learned, slowly, as my eyes were opened, that the old man loves truth and hates sham in speech or living so utterly that he sees far and clearly. I have learned to regard the look of approval or of searching gravity in his bright, tired eyes as my surest guide. He seems to me a wise man, if ever wise man was. And he accepts my way of life, seems pleased I lead it so, and shares it with me.

For as time went on, I saw Don Feliciano more and more. He took to spending the sunny forenoons in the cool depths of the garden, until I learned to look for him every day and to feel disappointed if he did not come. He was the best of company, though we did not talk much together. In fact, I think Don Feliciano came quite as much to be in the house as to be with me.

"It seems good to see it all alive once more," he would often murmur, as we sat together under the light-shot shade of the old gnarled poincianas on the seaward side of the house, and watched the aimless busyness of the over-crowded household and listened to the hum of it, like to a hive of bees. "It is so very good to see it all alive. She liked it that way. I have kept Her house shut up too long, and you give me great pleasure by living here and making it alive."

As our intimacy progressed, he fell into the way of dropping in less formally for a few moments, whenever occasion offered. And especially we took, Don Feliciano and I, to stealing away from the pleasantly noisy gaiety in the houses of our friends, towards the middle of the evening, for a quiet hour together in the dimly lighted sala of the House of Forgetfulness. At such times, too, Don Feliciano spoke little, seeming quite content to sit looking about him.

"It is the hour She liked best of all," he would say sometimes. "The world is so still and peaceful now, and yet it is so very surely athrill with life. It might be asleep. One can almost hear it breathing lightly and evenly. You are never lonely here, in the solitude and quietness?"

"Never."

"I don't see how you could be," he would muse. "But perhaps I mean that I don't see how I could be. There are many memories to keep me company. But you are young and I wonder sometimes if you ought not to have young companions-"

"I have them," I would assure him softly and half seriously. "The longer I am here, the more homelike the house becomes to me, in that strange way I noticed at the first. It seems as if Another were living here beside me, some gentle presence whom I do not see, but whose graciousness I feel. It's as though a dear friend sat in the next room, unseen, but within call of my voice if ever need arose for calling."

And Don Feliciano would answer happily: "You feel it, too? But I do not wonder. Fue dona cortesisima. It was foolish of me to fear misfortune here for you or any one." Through speaking of Her so often -I never heard the name of the bride who died in the midst of her young happiness-through speaking of her so often with Don Feliciano, I was led to think often and long of her when I was alone, and more and more abiding in me became the harmless fancy that in some way her gentleness brooded over the house where she had lived, and blessed it. It was so very harmless a fancy that I saw no reason for dismissing it. So it, too, added to my happiness while I woke and while I slept and dreamed.

One night, when Don Feliciano came up to the sala, he seemed more talkative than usual. "You are not lonely tonight?" he asked almost at

once.

"No."

"And never?" he asked. "There is never a time when you are lonely, when you feel some emptiness about you which only a-a comrade could fill?"

"I seem," said I, "to be perfectly happy just as I am. And I think I should be if I were to live here for a thousand years."

"You see," Don Feliciano said apologetically, "I am really an old curmudgeon at heart, and I was afraid you might be defrauding me of some atom of my rent." Suddenly he looked at me with a bit of keenness in his smiling eyes. "I saw your-ward-Pepita today," he said.

"Don't look at me," I begged, laughing, too, "as if you accused me of forgetting her. I have thought of her every-well, almost everyday, at least, and laid such plans for her. But there is no hurry, is there, when time is plentiful as it is here? I haven't seen her for a long time. Tell me how she is."

"I told her that I should carry you her greetings.'

"You have been talking with her?" I asked, a bit surprised.

"I often talk with her," said Don Feliciano. "She has become quite a friend of mine, since you taught me how astonishingly pretty she is. I have a weakness that way, as you know. I find," he added, watching me with twinkling eyes, "that she is thoroughly dissatisfied with you."

"I don't wonder," said I contritely. "I have neglected her. But it is hard here, somehow, to do the things one knows one ought to do. There is nothing going on, and yet the time is always filled. I ought to have taken pains to see her."

"I don't think it's that," said Don Feliciano. "She seems perfectly forgiving about faults of omission. But it seems to displease her very much that you should be what she calls rich. For she says that you are rich, and she does not like it. I told her that she was very selfish, but I couldn't seem to change her attitude at all. She doesn't like it."

"She is not selfish at all," I interposed. "She is the most unselfish

thing alive. Even this feeling is more than half unselfish. You see, she thought once that I was very poor, poorer than she is, so that she pitied me and wanted to share her abundance with me. And now, of course, she feels that she has been cheated of her right to mother me. No wonder she doesn't like it. She is a Mother-Mind incarnate."

"Well," said Don Feliciano, "I can assure you that she's an indignant Mother-Mind just now. I think she'd like to spank you and me and every one connected with the change in your affairs, in most maternal fashion."

"I shouldn't blame her for feeling that I have been neglectful," I said again. "But it's partly her own fault. She might have come to see me once in a while."

"She could not very well do that," said my companion.

"Why not," I demanded, "when this house is so full of people coming and going that it's like a public place?"

"That isn't it," Don Feliciano explained. "She could not come when she knew that Dona Ceferina would not approve of it."

"I had hoped, at least," said I, "that Dona Ceferina trusted me.'

[ocr errors]

He laughed outright. "She trusts. you, perhaps," he said, "but she distrusts your impetuous youth. Dona Ceferina is a very wise woman in her day and generation."

"In what way?" I asked skeptically.

"Don't you think, perhaps, that Dona Ceferina may have her plans for you? I am a traitor for suggesting it, but if she had, surely she can see as well as any one that Pepita is a thousand times more distracting in a young man's eyes than any of the proper young ladies into whose company she continually throws you, and whom you treat with such unflattering equality of interest."

"When she hopes that one of them will dazzle me into wedlock!" I cried, laughing. "That sort of thing seems to be in the very air of Felicidad, doesn't it? My first morning here you condemned a pair of culprits to it, and now I find Dona Ceferina with her plans for me. wonder how many such conflicting schemes may be afloat around us? Marriage is evidently the commonest ambition of mankind in Felicidad?"

"It's a very natural ambition, certainly," said Don Feliciano dryly. "For instance, it's the very thing you once planned for Pepita, isn't it? Have you given up your plans, or do you still retain your hopefulness?"

"Only give me time," said I, "and I will find her twenty of them, as Dona Ceferina does not say."

"It ought not to be hard," he said thoughtfully. "I have been watching her a good deal of late, and I find much to admire in her."

"The difficulty," said I, "lies in finding a man worthy of her."

"If I remember," Don Feliciano smiled, "he must be tactfully masterful, mustn't he, and smilingly serious, and gently unchangeable, and-"

"All that," I said, laughing with him once again. "That and much more, to be worthy of her."

Suddenly Don Feliciano was quite serious. "I have never known," he said, "a man who was worthy to be the husband of a woman. But he can always try to be," he added softly. "We can all of us always try to be. Now I must be getting back to Besa's. Ceferina will be ready to go home."

The upshot of that conversation was that I remembered my friend Pepita with a kindliness which was a little less vague and bodiless than it had been. I resolved that she should have her full share of that new life of mine, the coming of

which had so disappointed her. But there seemed to be no hurry about it.

So, there being no hurry about anything, I was satisfied to go on dreaming mildly radiant dreams of the future which should be Pepita's when the time came. I dreamed them ceaselessly, they were so very pleasant; while I was sitting in my garden with an unregarded book, and in the long evenings in the sala, and in the hush of the nights when I lay, half awake, on the cool grass

mats.

"All that shall be hers sometime," said I generously, and was satisfied, even though I rarely saw her, and she never came to see me, and Don Feliciano brought me no more greetings from her. There was time enough in Felicidad for everything, and its great listlessness had hold of me.

Days lengthen into weeks; weeks into months. The cane grows broad and tall again and stretches in golden-yellow billows over the fields. I have been living a whole year in Happiness and have paid my rent.

Harvest-time comes and goes, and the days cool to the clear, crisp brightness of the coming Advent season. Still I live on peacefully, if idly, in the House of Forgetfulness. "Sometime I will do something," I assure myself. "But there is time enough," and I turn again to my dreams.

And if the gentle spirit which rules my house begins sometimes, in fancy, to take form a little from the void, if for an instant sometimes I seem to see, amid the shadows in the sala when I sit very late, a slender figure and a face I know and love in a dilettante sort of way, if I even seem sometimes to catch the moth-like flutter of a hand above a shapely head and the sparkle of a pair of laughing eyes, where's the harm in that? It is a harmless fancy enough. I do not discourage it.

It makes my contentment all the more complete to realize that through all changes, old friends are still dear to me and unforgotten; that they come to see me sometimes there in my solitary house.

So the year draws on to the Christmas season.

CHAPTER XXII

Reveillon

It was Christmas Eve and a clear, dark night. The stars burned very large and soft, like distant yellow fires in the black vault of the sky.

Beyond the vague mass of the village roofs, close above the northern horizon, one star shone out from all the rest. I stood on the little balcony over the garden and watched it moodily, until at last footsteps sounded in the sala.

Don Feliciano came out into the balcony.

"I thought you'd never get here," I said to him.

He understood me at once. "I thought you might be lonely tonight," he said.

I laughed. "Lonely?" said I. "Lonely's not the word. Don Feliciano, do you see the star that lies so close above the palms there? Perhaps you know what one it is?"

"No," he answered. "They are all just stars to me. I envy men who have lived much on the sea. They seem They seem to know the stars so well, like friends."

"In the land where I was born," said I, "other people than seamen know that star. Little children could point it out to you. It is the Pole Star."

"Ah," said Don Feliciano, leaning forward. "I have often heard it. spoken of. I must have a look at it." He watched it for a while. "It is not a very big one," he said.

"No," said I, "it is an insignificant little star enough. Yet tonight,

« AnteriorContinuar »