The next day Billy arrived, a thin, white scarecrow of a dog.  He was sick and unhappy, and would eat nothing, and started up at the slightest sound.  He was listening for the Italian’s footsteps, but he never came, and one day Mr. Harry looked up from his newspaper and said, “Laura, Bellini is dead.”  Miss Laura’s eyes filled with tears, and Billy, who had jumped up when he heard his master’s name, fell back again.  He knew what they meant, and from that instant he ceased listening for footsteps, and lay quite still till he died.  Miss Laura had him put in a little wooden box, and buried him in a corner of the garden, and when she is working among her flowers, she often speaks regretfully of him, and of poor Dandy, who lies in the garden at Fairport.

Bella, the parrot, lives with Mrs. Morris, and is as smart as ever.  I have heard that parrots live to a very great age.  Some of them even get to be a hundred years old.  If that is the case, Bella will outlive all of us.  She notices that I am getting blind and feeble, and when I go down to call on Mrs. Morris, she calls out to me, “Keep a stiff upper lip, Beautiful Joe.  Never say die, Beautiful Joe.  Keep the game a-going, Beautiful Joe.”

Mrs. Morris says that she doesn’t know where Bella picks up her slang words.  I think it is Mr. Ned who teaches her, for when he comes home in the summer he often says, with a sly twinkle in his eye, “Come out into the garden, Bella,” and he lies in a hammock under the trees, and Bella perches on a branch near him, and he talks to her by the hour.  Anyway, it is in the autumn after he leaves Riverdale that Bella always shocks Mrs. Morris with her slang talk.

I am glad that I am to end my days in Riverdale.  Fairport was a very nice place, but it was not open and free like this farm.  I take a walk every morning that the sun shines.  I go out among the horses and cows, and stop to watch the hens pecking at their food.  This is a happy place, and I hope my dear Miss Laura will live to enjoy it many years after I am gone.

I have very few worries.  The pigs bother me a little in the spring, by rooting up the bones that I bury in the fields in the fall, but that is a small matter, and I try not to mind it.  I get a great many bones here, and I should be glad if I had some poor, city dogs to help me eat them.  I don’t think bones are good for pigs.

Then there is Mr. Harry’s tame squirrel out in one of the barns that teases me considerably.  He knows that I can’t chase him, now that my legs are so stiff with rheumatism, and he takes delight in showing me how spry he can be, darting around me and whisking his tail almost in my face, and trying to get me to run after him, so that he can laugh at me.  I don’t think that he is a very thoughtful squirrel, but I try not to notice him.

The sailor boy who gave Bella to the Morrises has got to be a large, stout man, and is the first mate of a vessel.  He sometimes comes here, and when he does, he always brings the Morrises presents of foreign fruits and curiosities of different kinds.