156 Bird - Lore
jar, hardly big enough to hold him, and run his beak around the crack of the lid. vainly trying to open it.
The trick I found the hardest to forgive him was the destruction of some of my house plants. With great pains I had constructed a flower-stand I had seen described in some magazine, the basis of the affair being. I think, an old wash-stand and a couple of tin basins. It was fearfully and wonderfully made and I was vastly proud of it, Fancy my feelings when I came in one day and found everything a complete wreck, and King Cole seated on the top of all, surveying his work of destruction and talking softly to himself with an air of complete satisfaction. He had pulled up every geranium plant, stripped 05 all the leaves, and had laid the stalks in regular rows on the window-sill. The little yellow blossoms of a trailing plant were scattered far and wide about the room, some even on the mantel and the book-shelves, so that he must have carried them in his beak and laid them there; not a single blossom was left on the plant. and it had been very full of bloom. When the villain saw me. he gave a scream of fright and. scrambling out of the debris, flew out of the window and away, and did not return for several days,
We owned a clever little rat-terrier called ‘Nettle,’ at that time, but, com- pared with the wisdom of King Cole, Nettle‘s sagacity sank into insignifi- cance. To tease her and a melancholy old cat who was then ten. and who lived to be seventeen years old, whom we called IMawther Gummidge,’ was King Cole‘s greatest delight. He always went to work in precisely the same way. He would waylay Mawther, and, ambling gravely after her, nip her daintin on the joint of one of her hind legs, Mawther had learned to protect her caudal appendage from these rear attacks, so he was forced to open hostilities upon her leg. She was usually too deeply sunk in apathy to take to her heels at once and put herself beyond his reach, but would turn upon him with a look of deep reproach. whereupon he would rush violently at her nose. To protect that weather-beaten feature, poor Mawther would quickly turn about again, and so would catch it once more on the leg, only this time the tweak would be a hard one. This had the effect of rousing her meek spirit, and a very one~sided combat would follow, Puss getting much the worst of the battle. After putting her to rout, King Cole would fly upon the win- dowvsill and mock his retiring foe by as good an imitation of her ‘meows‘ as he was able to give. In time he became a very fair mimic; he could ‘cluck‘ like a hen, gabhle and hiss like geese. and if several people were talking together in his hearing he would retire to another room and there imitate them by uttering a succession of guttural sounds in different notes precisely like the voices of two or more persons conversing in low tones,
Nettle and King Cole were the best of friends, and,when the Crow was not in his mischievous mood. they would play together by the hour. Nettle bore his teasing more good-naturedly than did the misanthropic Mawther,
