"Marry, this is miching mallecho; it means mischief."

So our dog has few friends outside his home. It is difficult to
maintain with the children on the hill the pleasant fiction that their
Christmas playthings come from Hamlet when it so obviously "harrows"
him "with fear and wonder" to see the little recipients allowed to bear
these objects away. Laddie's mistress, ever gracious, pets and praises
him, and hers is the only home in the village at which, sure of a happy
welcome and delectable bits of bread and butter, he consents to call,
but Jack's mistress, catholic as her sympathies are, remembers an
unlucky encounter from which her famous comrade retired, blinking
queerly, the loser of a tooth. It is, of course, her theory that Hamlet
feloniously reached into Jack's mouth to snap out that treasure, while
to me it seems crystal clear that Jack uprooted the venerable fang
himself in an unholy effort to bite Hamlet; but now the collie is shut
up whenever the terrier comes, though they manage to exchange through
the windows a vituperative language not taught in our curriculum.

Hoping to extend this too limited circle of Hamlet's friendships, we
have accepted as a summer guest a cynical old parrot, who has already,
in a lifetime cruelly long for a captive, known a variety of vanishing
households. The tones that Poor Pol echoes, the names that he calls,
insistently and vainly, in his lonesome hours, the scraps of family
talk dating perhaps from five, ten, twenty years ago that his strange
voice, a mockery of the human, still repeats, make him, even to us, an
awesome personage, a Wandering Jew of the caged-pet generations. What
does he miss, what does he remember, as he sits sweetly crooning to
himself "Peek-a-boo, Pol," and then rasps crossly out, "Wal! what _is_
it?" and then falls to a direful groaning "Oh!" and "Ah!" over and
over, more and more feebly, as if in mimicry of a death-bed, and
suddenly spreads his wings, hurrahs like a boy on the Glorious Fourth
and storms our ears with a whole barn-yard of cackles and
cocka-doodledoos?

For the first few minutes after the arrival of Polonius, Hamlet
regarded the great cage, set on top of a tall revolving bookcase, and
its motionless perching inmate, whose plumage of sheeny green was
diversified by under-glints of red and the pride of a golden nape, as
new ornaments committed to his guardianship. Erect on his haunches, he
gazed up at them with an air of earnest respon