cats. Æneas was very long-legged and Dido lived with us a long time. I think it was she who went every evening with father for his after dinner walk and cigar.
One Thanksgiving time the wagon from the ranch came, bringing us a couple of barrels of apples, a load of wood and a fine turkey for the feast day. Imagine our dismay, one afternoon, to see it mount up on its wings and soar majestically from our hill top back-yard down to the corner of First and Broadway below. He escaped us but, I presume, to some one else he came as a direct answer to prayer.
Father was always interested in flowers and was very successful in making them grow. Usually there was a box of slips out in the back yard. Often he would bring in a rich red Ragged Robin bud, dew-wet, to lay by mother’s napkin for breakfast. For himself he put a sprig of lemon-verbena in his button-hole. For some reason, he excepted orange colored flowers from his favor. He made mock of the gay little runners by twisting their name into “nasty-urchins.”
The windows of my room, directly over the parlor, were covered with a large, climbing “Baltimore Belle,” an old-fashioned small cluster rose that I never see now-a-days. From my side window I looked out on a long row of blue-blossomed agapanthus, interspersed with pink belladonnas, flowers that in summer repeated the blue of the mountains touched at sunset with pink lights.
Every night when ready for bed, I opened the in
