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, tonight, 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. Ishall 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.""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. Ishall 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.