It is easier to begin with our beasts.—First, they are much the most important, and secondly, there are only six of them. Our bulbs lie in their thousands with just a green nose showing here and there now in January and are nameless things: only collectively dear, if extraordinarily so.

It will instantly be perceived what kind of gardeners we are, and what kind of garden we keep. We have scarcely a single plant of “individuality.” We do not spend ten guineas on a jonquil bulb, nor fifteen on a peony. To our mind no flower can be common: therefore we lavish our resources on quantity. I was going to say: not quality, but that is where, in our opinion, the modern kind of garden-maker goes wrong. What is in a name? Where flowers are concerned, nothing! But how much, what treasures of joy and colour, of shade and exquisite texture, of general blessedness in fact, lurk in the beloved crowd of the nameless things, that come to us designated only thus: “Best mixed Darwin Tulips”; “Blue bedding Hyacinths”; “Single Jonquils, best mixed,” and so on! We once descended so far as to order “a hundred mixed Delphiniums at 10s.,” and when, last June, we looked down on a certain bed in the Reserve Garden from the seat under The Beech Tree which commands that enthralling spot and saw the blue battalion glowing with enamel colours draw up against the moor beyond, we felt not at all ashamed of ourselves—yea, we felt conceitedly pleased.

But our beasts are individual indeed; and, as it was said, there are only six of them.

The first in order of importance is the Pekinese, who, purchased at a moment when we were much under the enchantment of the “Ring,” we ineptly—yet, from the ethnological standpoint, not altogether inappropriately—called Loki: his coat is fiery red, and he is an adept at deceit. When we want to impress strangers we hastily explain that he is Mo-Loki, son of the great Mo-Choki, the celebrated champion. Loki who frequently assures us that he was a Lion, in Pekin was born on the roof of the Imperial Palace in High Street, Kensington. His appearance and behaviour are such as bear testimony to his princely lineage. We let him run a great deal when he was a puppy, with the result that his legs are a little longer than is usual with members of the Imperial Dynasty, but “Grandpa”—Stop! It is as well to explain from the outset that, since the advent of Loki in the family, Grandpa is the name that has devolved, automatically, upon the Master of the House: the infant Loki’s mistress having assumed, from the very necessity of things, the post and responsibility of mother in Pekinese ma-ma, it must follow as the night the day that her father “illico” became Grandpa.—To resume: though his legs are a trifle longer than is usual, the Master of the House says he is much more beautiful by reason of this distinction. And we all agree with him.

Loki will not believe that the Manchu masters have fallen in China of course it is not from us that he has heard these distressing rumours, so he still demands as his right the best silk eiderdowns to lie upon, satin for his cushions, grilled kidney for his breakfast, freshly poured water in his bowl every time he wants to drink; and expects immediate attention at lunch and dinner-time, play-time, “bye-bye” time, and all the other times when he thinks he would like his chest rubbed. He sits up and waves his paws with imperious gesture; or else rolls over on his back and puts them together in an attitude of prayer. He had not at first much oriental calm about him. Indeed, when he first came to us his one desire was to play with every living thing he saw, from a cow to a chicken; but the cow misunderstood and ran at him, and the chicken misunderstood and ran away. The poor puppy was perplexed and wounded. He always believed every new Teddy bear toy to be alive at first, and would receive it in a rapture of tail-wagging and nuzzling kisses, until what time, it dawning upon him that Teddy was a senseless fraud, he set himself to shake and worry it like a little fury. Now he is older and wiser. He pretends not to see cows, and condemns chickens; he will growl at a strange dog, and bite and shake a new toy the very first day. Thus, alas, do years make a cynic of the young idealist!

He only plays with his own animals. These are: Susan, the Butler’s dog, and Arabella, the Lavroch setter, a long, lovely, lithe, foolish creature, whose surname is Stewart, having come to Villino Loki out of far Scotland from a distinguished member of that Royal clan. Arabella, who is ten times the size of Loki, turns him over and over, tramples on him, nibbles and licks him till he is unspeakable. He will leap at her nose, hang on to one of her long flapping ears, race up and down the slopes and round and round the green terraces, till they both collapse, and their tongues hang out of their laughing mouths, seeming to flicker with their panting breath, and become as long as the tongues of dragons on old manuscripts.

A matter to be noticed is that they never play in their walks with us across the moors—apparently that is against dog etiquette—but they will lie in wait for each other at the garden gate on the way home, and the fun and the pouncing and growling jocosities begin the instant they are inside.

Susan doesn’t play with the other animals, though she exercises an irresistible fascination upon every dog that comes within a mile of her. She has a kind of Jane Eyre charm, we suppose, for it is not at first visible to the naked eye. She always does remind us of a small elderly German governess, for she is squat, undemonstrative, and eminently—oh, eminently!—respectable. She is a fox-terrier. She has, however, one terrible weakness. Her only joy is to have stones thrown for her. She is not, therefore, an agreeable person to take out for a walk, for she will get right under your feet, dig up a stone, point at it, and bark, “Throw, throw!” with a shrill persistence that goes through your head. And if you are weak-minded enough to yield, then indeed you are undone. You will be kept throwing till you wish her in the Dog Star. She will scratch up stones till her paws are raw. This we think a great defect, but Loki sees no flaw in her.

When Susan’s Butler first came to us, we had suffered acutely from butlers young and butlers old, butlers bashful and butlers bold—all of whom drank steadily. One nearly murdered his Buttons. Another, engaged by correspondence, vouched for by the agency, announcing his years as forty-five, arrived huge, decrepit, asthmatic; almost, if not quite, qualified for an old-age pension. The eight o’clock dinner he found it impossible to serve before nine; and then that ceremony became a perfect torture of dazed crawling, enlivened by stertorous breathing, for which asthma and chronic alcoholism disputed responsibility. When the Master of the House, who is very tender-hearted, intimated that he thought that, for the good of the newcomer’s health, they had better part with the utmost celerity, the veteran assented resignedly with the husky gasp peculiar to him.

“You know,” said the Master of the House, mildly, “you are not quite what you represented yourself to be. You said you were forty-five!”

“I think,” wheezed the Ancient Cellarer; “I think I said forty-seven, sir.”

“Oh, forty-seven!” The Master of the House was a little satiric. “Even if you had said forty-seven, you are a great, great deal more than that!”

“Sir,” said the delinquent, with a beery twinkle, “no butler can ever be more than forty-seven.”

This, we understand, is a maxim of life in the profession.

A third—he was young and beautiful—had a fondness for a brew called gin-and-ginger, which had so cheering and immediate effect upon him that, having left the drawing-room after tea the very pink and perfection of propriety, he would announce dinner in an advanced condition of jocular elevation, and when the plates slid out of his hands he would survey them with a waggish smile, as one who would say: “Bless their little hearts, see how playful they are!” We became anxious to secure a servant who would have more than a few streaks of sobriety, and when Susan’s owner came, we felt we had secured that pearl. He came in a great hurry without Susan because of the equally hurried departure of the beautiful hilarious one. After a week or so, we asked him if he would consider us as a permanency. He said he would have to consider us a little longer. After another ten days he informed us of Susan’s existence, and announced his intention of going to fetch her. We breathed again.

Juvenal—that is his name—is very fond of animals. A little too fond, we thought, when he invited a military friend’s dog to stay, during the owner’s absence at manoeuvres. This animal, by name O’Reilly, arrived in dilapidated, devil-may-care, barrack-yard condition, which was a great shock to our Manchu prince. He also had pink bald elbows and knees. His hind legs were longer than his front ones, which gave him an ourang-outang gait. As became his Milesian name, he fought every one he met on his walks. Why he did not fight Loki, we do not know, for Loki loathed him and, we believe, suffered acutely in his poor little Chinese soul all during his stay. Yet unwelcome as he was, scald, ungainly, tiresome, there was something pathetic about the creature. He had a way of looking at one, deprecating and pleading at once; and he would display such rapture at the smallest token of toleration, that, despite our satisfaction at his departure, we had an ache in our hearts too. We have a shrewd suspicion that the corporal-major who owned him was a rough customer, and that poor O’Reilly’s life was not that happy one which every “owned” dog’s ought to be. A dog should not be treated as a dog.

As for cats, once they have passed the giddy days of youth, in which they are imps, sprites, goblins, pucks, furry, fairy, freakish things—anything but mere animals—one cannot help feeling a certain awe with regard to them. Despite the many cycles of years that have elapsed since their ancestors took habitation with us, they have remained true Easterns. From father to son, from mother to daughter they have handed down secret stores of occult knowledge which they keep jealously to themselves, a sacred inheritance of race. Those eyes that fix you with pupil contracted to a slit, and look through and beyond you into mysteries undreamt of by you: that lofty detachment, that ineradicable independence, that relentless indifference: have we not all felt by these signs and tokens how completely the cat puts us outside the sphere of his real thoughts and feelings? Priests or priestesses they seem to be, of some alien creed, soul satisfying, contemplative, with sudden savage rites. Have you ever watched a cat with regard turned inwards, meditating? Its body sways, but the spirit bubbles softly as if it were seething in content over a mystic fire. It does not want you to join it in its rapture, like your dog. It has no desire to admit you into its comradeship. It is as self-contained and self-absorbed as the highest grade Mahatma.

Kitty-Wee, the Lovely, is chief of our three cats. She is a Persian lady with a wonderful robe of silver grey, faintly blue, and orange eyes inherited from that most beautiful, most evil monster, Tittums the Bold-and-Bad, her father, who spent his adorable kittenhood and his stormy youth under our London roof, until his habit of lying in wait for the servants at odd corners and jumping at their elbows, made it imperative for us to part with him. He was then adopted by a gentle parson’s daughter, in the freedom of whose country dwelling it was hoped that he might sow his wild oats and settle down into respectability. But alas! the day dawned, when lying on the rector’s cassock in the dining-room, he was so incensed at the reverend gentleman’s polite request to move, that he chased him round and round the room, ran him down in the hall and bit him. The churchman was not an unreasonable being and had made many allowances for the frailty of degenerate creation; but he drew the line at the violation of his reverend elbows. Tittums was once again, with many tears and heart-rendings, passed on. This time to a lady who keeps a cattery. We hear that he has become a model of every virtue, and that she only wears a fencing mask and boxing gloves when she combs him, because on the day when she left them off, Tittums, in a fit of absence of mind, bit her through the thumb. Anyone who takes a cat paper can hear more of this most distinguished beast, under the name of “Saracinesca.”

Kitty-Wee is supposed to have inherited her father’s superlative looks—only he was “smoke”—and her mother’s angelic disposition. If occasionally a spark of the paternal temper flashes out, the gardener’s wife with whom she prefers to dwell says “Kitty is a bit nervous to-day.”

It was after Kitty-Wee’s first mÉsalliance that she took up her abode with the worthy pair in the “little cot,” as Mrs. Adam calls it, at the bottom of the garden. Persian princesses, from the time of “A Thousand and One Nights” onwards, are proverbially capricious. But what perverse freak of youthful fancy induced our delicate silver-pawed highborn damsel to fix her young affections upon Mr. Hopkinson was and is, a painful mystery.

Mr. Hopkinson, a very hooligan among cats, so degenerate indeed as to have lost all his eastern characteristics, and to have assumed a positively “Arry-like, bank-’oliday, disreputable, Hampstead-Heath kind of vulgarity,” was a lean, mangy creature with a denuded tail. He had a black spot over one eye; the other eye was conspicuous by its absence. We could hear his raucous voice uplifted in serenade, suggestive of accordeons, night after night, and his guttural whisper of “Me ’Oighness” behind the bushes when we went on our walks. Every effort was made to discourage the preposterous suitor. But, alas! Kitty smiled. The infatuated Princess escaped the vigilance of her distracted family. Perhaps it is best to draw a veil over the consequences of this rash alliance. Kitty indeed did her best to obliterate them, refusing to do anything but sit heavily on three black and white kittens with ropy tails. She only purred again the day the last one died; “Oh! she was pleased, Mam,” said the gardener’s wife; “quite took up again, she did.”

Kitty-Wee’s next matrimonial venture, though likewise, we grieve to say, morganatic, was very much more successful. In fact it is to it that we owe—Bunny! The name, the lineage, the very personality of Bunny’s father is wrapt in mystery; but judging by the splendour of Bunny’s black fur, it is to be conjectured that Kitty-Wee’s choice was of a dark complexion, and if not royal, at any rate of noble blood.

Two brave brothers Bunny had, but he is the sole survivor; all the more cherished. And really, even if he lacks his mother’s supreme distinction, we cannot but feel proud of him. Waggish, gentle, humorous creature that he is, he will hang round the neck of Adam, the gardener, like a boa, for a whole morning together; or stalk the dogs from tree to tree, pounce on them at unexpected moments to deliver a swinging friendly slap on Susan’s fat back, or to waltz with Arabella, or to inveigle Loki, with odd freakish sidelong gambols, into a mysterious game of his own, which, as our little Chinaman has something of the cat in him, he seems to understand.

We are very glad that Adam had Bunny to console him, for Kitty-Wee’s offspring has an odd resemblance in size and appearance to CÆsar, the late Garden Cat, much beloved, who alas! went the way of all fur with a melancholy little assistance from the chemist shortly before Bunny’s appearance in this plane.

“Oh, Miss,” said Mrs. Adam, on the Sunday that followed that Socratic tragedy, “last night was the most dreadful night we ever spent! It was the first time for thirteen years we hadn’t had a cat in the house! Oh! Miss, I thought Daddy would have broken his heart. He just sat with his head on his hand, and sighed. Really Miss Marie, I don’t know when we’ve felt so bad.”

It will be seen that Mr. and Mrs. Adam have the right feeling towards “little sister cat and little brother dog,” as St. Francis of Assisi would have called them. This suits us very well, and oddly enough, Villino Loki is a kind of paradise for things of fur and feather. Cat and dog live in a strange harmony. To see Loki kiss Bunny, or Bunny clasp Arabella round the neck, is as pleasing a sight as you could imagine. And if Kitty-Wee occasionally boxes Loki with a kind of delicate compactness, it is with her claws in. As for Juvenal, the butler, whose pantry is full of singing birds, no sense of etiquette will restrain him from public blandishments when Loki is on the scene. George, the footman, can be heard addressing him—Loki—in back passages, as “My loved one!” And Tom, the old long-haired English cat, rules the kitchen.

Tom has reached the patriarchal age of eighteen years, and is cherished by the master of the Villino. He has had many vicissitudes. He was stung by an adder during our very first summer, years ago, on these moors, and lay for a day in a coma with one paw swollen the size of a child’s arm, to be saved by doses of brandy and milk. A few years later he was caught in a trap. How he got free no one knows, but we found him crawling, piteously complaining, with a shattered leg. With the help of the cook, who followed the tradition of the establishment and was Tom’s slave, the leg was set with strips of firewood, the bone being very successfully mended. It so happened that the Master of the House had, about the same time, snapped his tendo-plantaris at tennis; and it was a sight to see them both when they stumped down the wooden passages—the master dot-and-go-one on his crutches, Thomas following in his splints, dot-and-go-three.

The amateur surgery, however, was not completely successful. Though Thomas’ bone knit, the poor mangled flesh remained unhealed, and at last the cook conveyed her darling in a basket to the most celebrated London animal doctor. Thereafter ensued a time of horrible suspense. Telegrams went briskly backwards and forwards. Dr. Jewell “doubted if he could save the limb.” Tom’s adoring family could not contemplate the tragedy therein implied. “Better euthanasia!” we wired. “Will do my best for little cat,” the sympathetic Æsculapius of God’s humble creatures replied. Hope and devotion triumphed. Tommy returned to us with three legs in large fur trousers, the fourth as close as a mouse. The fur thereon has never grown to full length again. We fear it will never grow now.

Dear old Tom is toothless, and he is getting a little bald on the top of his head; but he is a beautiful creature still, and a dandy. His four spats are always of an almost startling snowiness; his shirt-front ditto. He is not very fond of any of the other animals, and was so revolted by Kitty-Wee’s mÉsalliance that she could not show her face in the kitchen without his instantly using as severe language as ever John Knox to Queen Mary. “Hussy!” was the mildest of his terms.