“But,” said his dear, beside him, “you remember what Blake said: 

   “’A Robin Redbreast in a cage
   Puts all heaven in a rage.’”

“Ah—­but not when it is treated truly with kindness, my dear.  I shall immediately order some rabbits, and a canary or two, and—­what sort of a dog would you prefer our dear little ones to have to play with, my sweet?”

And his dear looked at him in all his imperturbable, complacent self-consciousness of kindness, and saw herself the little rural school-teacher who, with Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Lord Byron as her idols, and with the dream of herself writing “Poems of Passion,” had come up to Topeka Town to be beaten by the game into marrying the solid, substantial business man beside her, who enjoyed delight in the spectacle of cats and rats walking the tight-rope in amity, and who was blissfully unaware that she was the Robin Redbreast in a cage that put all heaven in a rage.

“The rats are bad enough,” said Miss Merle Merryweather.  “But look how he uses up the cats.  He’s had three die on him in the last two weeks to my certain knowledge.  They’re only alley-cats, but they’ve got feelings.  It’s that boxing match that does for them.”

The boxing match, sure always of a great hand from the audience, invariably concluded Duckworth’s turn.  Two cats, with small boxing-gloves, were put on a table for a friendly bout.  Naturally, the cats that performed with the rats were too cowed for this.  It was the fresh cats he used, the ones with spunk and spirit . . . until they lost all spunk and spirit or sickened and died.  To the audience it was a side-splitting, playful encounter between four-legged creatures who thus displayed a ridiculous resemblance to superior, two-legged man.  But it was not playful to the cats.  They were always excited into starting a real fight with each other off stage just before they were brought on.  In the blows they struck were anger and pain and bewilderment and fear.  And the gloves just would come off, so that they were ripping and tearing at each other, biting as well as making the fur fly, like furies, when the curtain went down.  In the eyes of the audience this apparent impromptu was always the ultimate scream, and the laughter and applause would compel the curtain up again to reveal Duckworth and an assistant stage-hand, as if caught by surprise, fanning the two belligerents with towels.

But the cats themselves were so continually torn and scratched that the wounds never had a chance to heal and became infected until they were a mass of sores.  On occasion they died, or, when they had become too abjectly spiritless to attack even a rat, were set to work on the tight-rope with the doped starved rats that were too near dead to run away from them.  And, as Miss Merle Merryweather said:  the bonehead audiences, tickled to death, applauded Duckworth’s Trained Cats and Rats as an educational act!