CHICAGO, January 10th.

To the Editor:  I am very sorry for the gentleman who writes your Sharps and Flats, for I know what it is to lose a little dog.  I had one once and some boy I guess took it off and never brought it back again.  I have got a maltese cat and four beautiful kittens, and should like to send the gentleman one of the kittens if he wants one.  Maybe he would get to like the kitten as much as he did the little dog.  Respectfully, your little friend,

  EDITH LONG.

“Many thanks to our charming little correspondent; she has a gentle heart, we know.  What havoc one of those mischievous creatures would make!  In the first place it would accomplish the destruction of these little canaries of ours which now flit about this lovely disordered room, perching confidently upon folios and bric-a-brac and hopping blithely over the manuscripts and papers on the table.  In the basement against the furnace, three beautiful fleecy little chickens have just hatched out.  How long do you suppose it would be before that wicked little kitten discovered and compassed the demolition of those innocent baby fowls?  Then again there are rabbits in the stable and very tame pigeons and the tiniest of bantams.  It would be very dreadful to introduce a truculent kitten (and all felines are naturally truculent) into such society.  And our blood fairly congeals when we think that perhaps (oh, fearful possibility) that kitten might nose out and wantonly destroy the too lovely butterflies stored away in yonder closet, which we have appropriately named the cage of gloom.

  “Miss Edith must keep her kitten and may she have the pleasure of
  its pretty antics.  However, she must bear this in mind, that sooner
  or later our pets come to grief.

“Very, very many years ago, we read and cried over a little book written by Grace Greenwood and entitled ‘The History of My Pets.’  Even as a child we wondered why it was that evil invariably befell the pets of youth.

“We all know that most little folks are tender-hearted, yet there are some who seem indifferent to pets, to have little sympathy with the pathos of dumb animals.  And we have so often wondered whether after all these latter did not get more of pleasure or should we say less of pain out of life than the others.  The tender heart seldom hardens; in maturer years its comprehensions and sympathies broaden, and this of course involves pain.  Are the delights of sympathy a fair offset to the pains thereof?”

The boy at Amherst was the father of the man at forty-two.  It was to the prototype of “The Bench-Legged Fyce,” known in Miss French’s household as “Dooley,” that the boy Eugene attributed his first verse, a parody on the well-known lines, “Oh, had I the wings of a dove!” Dooley’s song ran: 

  Oh, had I wings like a dove I would fly
    Away from this world of fleas;
  I’d fly all round Miss Emerson’s yard
    And light on Miss Emerson’s trees.