“Dear Lamb,—Dash is very mad indeed. As I knew you would be
shocked to hear it, I did not volunteer to trouble your peaceful retreat by the
sad information, thinking it could do no good, either to you, to Dash, to us, or to the innocent creature that he has
already bitten, or to those he may (please God) bite hereafter. But when you
ask it of me as a friend, I cannot withhold the truth from you. The poor little
patient has resolutely refused to touch water (either
hot or cold) ever since, and if we attempt to force it down her throat, she
scratches, grins, fights, makes faces, and utters strange noises, showing every
recognised symptom of being very mad indeed. . . . As for your panacea (of
shooting the bitten one), we utterly set our faces against it, not thinking
death ‘a happy release’ under any given circumstances, and being
specially averse to
| 38 | CHARLES LAMB. |
“By the bye, it has just occurred to me, that the fact of the poor little sufferer making a noise more like a cat’s than a dog’s, may possibly indicate that she is not quite so mad as we at first feared. Still there is no saying but the symptom may be one of aggravation. Indeed I shouldn’t wonder if the ‘faculty’ preferred the bark, as that (under the queer name of quinine) has been getting very fashionable among them of late.
“I wish you could have seen the poor little patient before we got rid of her—how she scoured round the kitchen among the pots and pans, scampered about the garden, and clambered up to the tops of the highest trees. (No symptoms of high-drophobia, you will say, in that). . . .
“By the bye again, I have entirely forgotten to tell
you, that the injured innocent is not one of our
children, but of the cat’s; and this reminds me to tell you that, putting
cats out of the question (to which, like some of his so-called
‘betters,’ Dash has evidently a
‘natural antipathy’), he comports himself
| CHARLES LAMB. | 39 |
“With respect to the second subject of your kind inquiries—the lady, and the success of her prescribed regimen—I will not say that she absolutely barks at the sight of water when proffered to her, but she shakes her head, and sighs piteously, which are bad symptoms. In sober seriousness, her watery regimen does not yet show any signs of doing her good, and we have now finally determined on going to France for the summer, and shall leave North End, with that purpose, in about three weeks.
“I was going up to Colnbrook Cottage on the very Monday
that you left; but (for a wonder) I took the precaution of calling on your
ancient friend at the factory in my way, and learned that you had left. . . .
| 40 | CHARLES LAMB. |
“Talking of being stopped on the King’s Highway, reminds me of Dash’s last exploit. He was out at near dusk, down the lane, a few nights ago, with his mistress (who is as fond of him as his master—please to be careful how you construe this last equivocally expressed phrase, and don’t make the ‘master’ an accusative case), when Dash attacked a carpenter, armed with a large saw—not Dash, but the carpenter—and a ‘wise saw’ it turned out, for its teeth protected him from Dash’s, and a battle royal ensued, worthy the Surrey Theatre. Mrs. Patmore says that it was really frightful to see the saw, and the way in which it and Dash gnashed their teeth at each other.” . . . .
