It was such a charming home!—my new one;
a fine great house, with pictures, and delicate decorations,
and rich furniture, and no gloom anywhere, but all
the wilderness of dainty colors lit up with flooding
sunshine; and the spacious grounds around it, and the
great garden—oh, greensward, and noble trees,
and flowers, no end! And I was the same as a
member of the family; and they loved me, and petted
me, and did not give me a new name, but called me by
my old one that was dear to me because my mother had
given it me —Aileen Mavoureen. She
got it out of a song; and the Grays knew that song,
and said it was a beautiful name.
Mrs. Gray was thirty, and so sweet and so lovely,
you cannot imagine it; and Sadie was ten, and just
like her mother, just a darling slender little copy
of her, with auburn tails down her back, and short
frocks; and the baby was a year old, and plump and
dimpled, and fond of me, and never could get enough
of hauling on my tail, and hugging me, and laughing
out its innocent happiness; and Mr. Gray was thirty-eight,
and tall and slender and handsome, a little bald in
front, alert, quick in his movements, business-like,
prompt, decided, unsentimental, and with that kind
of trim-chiseled face that just seems to glint and
sparkle with frosty intellectuality! He was a
renowned scientist. I do not know what the word
means, but my mother would know how to use it and
get effects. She would know how to depress a
rat-terrier with it and make a lap-dog look sorry
he came. But that is not the best one; the best
one was Laboratory. My mother could organize
a Trust on that one that would skin the tax-collars
off the whole herd. The laboratory was not a
book, or a picture, or a place to wash your hands in,
as the college president’s dog said—no,
that is the lavatory; the laboratory is quite different,
and is filled with jars, and bottles, and electrics,
and wires, and strange machines; and every week other
scientists came there and sat in the place, and used
the machines, and discussed, and made what they called
experiments and discoveries; and often I came, too,
and stood around and listened, and tried to learn,
for the sake of my mother, and in loving memory of
her, although it was a pain to me, as realizing what
she was losing out of her life and I gaining nothing
at all; for try as I might, I was never able to make
anything out of it at all.
Other times I lay on the floor in the mistress’s
work-room and slept, she gently using me for a foot-stool,
knowing it pleased me, for it was a caress; other
times I spent an hour in the nursery, and got well
tousled and made happy; other times I watched by the
crib there, when the baby was asleep and the nurse
out for a few minutes on the baby’s affairs;
other times I romped and raced through the grounds
and the garden with Sadie till we were tired out,
then slumbered on the grass in the shade of a tree
while she read her book; other times I went visiting
among the neighbor dogs —for there were
some most pleasant ones not far away, and one very
handsome and courteous and graceful one, a curly-haired
Irish setter by the name of Robin Adair, who was a
Presbyterian like me, and belonged to the Scotch minister.
