Compared with other show animals, he was well treated.  And much of the ill-treatment accorded other animals on the same turn with him he did not comprehend or guess.  One turn, with which he played for three months, was a scandal amongst all vaudeville performers.  Even the hardiest of them heartily disliked the turn and the man, although Duckworth, and Duckworth’s Trained Cats and Rats, were an invariable popular success.

“Trained cats!” sniffed dainty little Pearl La Pearle, the bicyclist.  “Crushed cats, that’s what they are.  All the cat has been beaten out of their blood, and they’ve become rats.  You can’t tell me.  I know.”

“Trained rats!” Manuel Fonseca, the contortionist, exploded in the bar-room of the Hotel Annandale, after refusing to drink with Duckworth.  “Doped rats, believe me.  Why don’t they jump off when they crawl along the tight rope with a cat in front and a cat behind?  Because they ain’t got the life in ’m to jump.  They’re doped, straight doped when they’re fresh, and starved afterward so as to making a saving on the dope.  They never are fed.  You can’t tell me.  I know.  Else why does he use up anywhere to forty or fifty rats a week!  I know his express shipments, when he can’t buy ’m in the towns.”

“My Gawd!” protested Miss Merle Merryweather, the Accordion Girl, who looked like sixteen on the stage, but who, in private life among her grand-children, acknowledged forty-eight.  “My Gawd, how the public can fall for it gets my honest-to-Gawd goat.  I looked myself yesterday morning early.  Out of thirty rats there were seven dead,—­starved to death.  He never feeds them.  They’re dying rats, dying of starvation, when they crawl along that rope.  That’s why they crawl.  If they had a bit of bread and cheese in their tummies they’d jump and run to get away from the cats.  They’re dying, they’re dying right there on the rope, trying to crawl as a dying man would try to crawl away from a tiger that was eating him.  And my Gawd!  The bonehead audience sits there and applauds the show as an educational act!”

But the audience!  “Wonderful things kindness will do with animals,” said a member of one, a banker and a deacon.  “Even human love can be taught to them by kindness.  The cat and the rat have been enemies since the world began.  Yet here, to-night, we have seen them doing highly trained feats together, and neither a cat committed one hostile or overt act against a rat, nor ever a rat showed it was afraid of a cat.  Human kindness!  The power of human kindness!”

“The lion and the lamb,” said another.  “We have it that when the millennium comes the lion and the lamb will lie down together—­and outside each other, my dear, outside each other.  And this is a forecast, a proving up, by man, ahead of the day.  Cats and rats!  Think of it.  And it shows conclusively the power of kindness.  I shall see to it at once that we get pets for our own children, our palm branches.  They shall learn kindness early, to the dog, the cat, yes, even the rat, and the pretty linnet in its cage.”