It was a curious coincidence that made him select a beer barrel, for thereby hung a tragic tale.  He and his twin-brother had been adopted from infancy by the Sergeants’ Mess and had lived in peace and plenty—­in fact in too much plenty, for I regret to say that Daisy’s brother died of drink from having formed the discreditable habit of emptying all the dregs of the Sergeants’ beer mugs into his own inside.  However, he was granted military obsequies, which were so successfully performed that an account of them found its way into one of the daily papers.  This so delighted the amateur undertakers that Daisy’s brother was at once exhumed and re-buried with further pomp and circumstance.  Daisy meanwhile, feeling himself of less consequence than the departed hero, began to mope; so to save life and reason he was sent to us “to cheer and cherish,” as the Sergeants put it.

An egotistical irascible bachelor seagull; yet his vices, and he was made up of them, became virtues in our eyes.

The morning after his arrival he went for a solemn tour of investigation, finally taking up his abode in the middle of the tennis-court, as being to his mind the most salubrious spot—­and from there he ruled despotically.  “That blooming bird fears neither man nor devil,” Cook was heard to mutter, after he had embedded his beak in her ankle; and it was quite true.  He so terrified Horatio, our portly bull-dog, by pecking at his sensitive kinky tail from behind when he was absent-mindedly lapping water from Daisy’s bath, that he never again ventured alone on to the lawn.  I say “alone,” for he dared once more, emboldened by the presence of his unwilling young wife, who accompanied him, tied by a rope to his collar.

Percy and I watched them advance from afar and waited in suspense for the sequel.  Daisy was taking a post-prandial nap inside his beer barrel.  There was a breathless hush, followed by a pandemonium of sound, masculine and feminine cries of distress mingled with raucous shrieks of anger, and then we saw our valiant couple in slow but ignominious retreat.  Horatio was dragging his spouse along on her back, with legs in air and bulging eyes!  What had happened in the interim we never knew, but both Mr. and Mrs. Horatio bore marks of battle, and they were sadder and wiser dogs for many days to come.

Percy, always deprecatingly anxious to find favour in Daisy’s eyes, tore down to the shore one morning before breakfast and returned with a large pailful of salt water, which he laid—­so to speak—­at Daisy’s feet.  Daisy glanced at it and at Percy with his cold grey eye, and then stepped lightly into his fresh-water tub, which was always at hand.  Percy however, being of an unsnubbable disposition, tried again to find a way into Daisy’s heart, and this time he brought Hengist and Horsa, two young seagulls that he had found derelict on the rocks, hoping that he would take a paternal interest in their loneliness; but, like his great prototype, Daisy clapped his glass to his sightless eye, and “I’m damned if I see them,” he said.  But he saw them all right at meal times, when he would whisk round suddenly as their portion of fish was flung to them, and swiftly gobble it up!