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Show AN IDYL OF THE NIGHT. Mr. Carmichel sat at his open window with a cloud on his thoughtful brow and a shotgun in his hand. He looked out upon the landscape flooded with nocturnal beauty, but no peace came into his soul or shone out of his face. The silver orb of light was sinking in a bank of fleecy clouds down to the wast'ard, with the deliberation and resolution of a tired tramp wrapping the drapery of the straw-stack about him. The pale light just kissed, with its uncertain beams, the roof of Carmichel's wood-shed, lingering on the warped shingles, with a regretful tenderness, like a boy getting out of bed on a winter morning. The South Hill maples, filled with the intense shadows, outlined the more sharply by the waning moon, rustled in ghostly whispers as the winds of the night sighed through their leafy canopies. The street-car bells were still, and the clay bank mule, the joy and pride of Eighth Street, was dreaming the happy hours away in the embedded strawness of his lonely stall. Long hours ago the lights had faded out of Donahue's grocery, and the members of the South Hill club had gone home. The silent stars looked down upon the slumbering city, as if their impassive, eternal patience might rebuke the gloom that clouded Mr. Carmichel's brow. The eyes of the citizen were sternly bent upon the roof of his woodshed. Following their direction the curious observer might have perceived in the failing light, a shadowy figure, stealthily measuring the shingles. At length it paused, and looking pensively at the full-orbed moon it split the silent night with a moaning wail that slid along like the chromatic scale on a $3 violin, only worse. "Ma-ri-ah-h-h!" And the echoing nocturne went sobbing down the deserted street ???Unreadable??? the solitudes of Stony Lonesome, startling the mapled hills into a thousand echoes which went rippling up the avenue, past the parsonage, across the classic campus of the Baptist college, and finally awakening Artie McArthur's burro, which shrieked back its alarm and discontent in a terrific "hee haw!" that blighted all the blossoms on the wisteria and set half the telephone bells on West Hill to ringing. "It's been that way all night," moaned Mr. Carmichel, turning his head and speaking to some unseen person within the room. "Then why don't you shoot it and come to bed?" said a sleepy voice in reply, "and not stand there all night making a spectacle of yourself at the window and catching your death of cold." The intelligent reader has already perceived from the fact that the folly of "making a spectacle of himself," was placed before the imminent danger of a fatal cold, that the second speaker was no other than Mrs. Carmichel. Her remark only served to deepen the gloom on Mr. Carmichel's brow. If he did not shoot the prowler of the night that had established its signal station on his wood shed, he could not sleep. If he fired the gun there was great danger that he might awaken a policeman, and feel the wrath of that conservator of public order, should he happen to awake in an ill humor. A night policeman, Mr. Carmichel was well aware, should be awakened tenderly and with great caution. A policeman rudely startled from his slumber at one o'clock in the morning, by the detonation of an untimely gun, has been known to fall from the salt barrel which he has made his humble but vigilant couch, and scrape his shins along the harsh and much abrading hoops. And he meddles with a firebrand who tries to talk politics to a man who has just scraped his shins. The incredulous reader may smile at the idea of a man sleeping on a salt barrel. Alas, the unbeliever then has never seen a night policeman on duty, with three burglars getting in their work on the same block. A salt barrel, well bestride, is a comfortable couch, an ice-cold doorstep is a bed of down, and a seven foot skid is the lap of luxury. But we digress. And while we have digressed, the clamorous echoes have died away and once more H. R. H. Silence reigns. Mr. Carmichel was on the point of turning away from the window when there was another revelation and long before the smoke of battle had cleared away, as it were, silence was dispossessed and clamor reigned as first consul in her gentle, noiseless stead. Once more the prowling figure on the shed lifted up its voice and sent this down the echoing corridors of time, and so far as Mr. Carmichel could observe, about fifty years into the dark and silent boulevards of eternity: "Comin'out? Comin'ow-wow-wow-out?" The distracted citizen shuddered and a frown of resolution settled on his face as he muttered: "Now will I do it." He half raised the weapon of death to his shoulder, when his arms fell nerveless on the window sill, his blood turned cold, his heart stopped beating, and all the milk in the cellar was soured by a wild, fierce yell that was enough to frighten Meigs Schenck's wolf. Out from the gloom of Priger's barn came the answering howl. The sound that had terrified Mr. Carmichel and set the baby to crying was as the sound of a trumpet to the yellow cat on the wood-shed. Joy filled its heart at the response to its oft repeated challenge, and it welcomed the unseen champion with fiercely joyous felines. (The choir will please sing two verses while the deacons take collection for that.) Running rapidly to the comb of the roof where the two sides, had there been more than one, would have united at the ridge pole, which was not there, the yellow cat looked up the street and then danced a rapid jig on the shingles and stuck its tail straight up in the air and pointed it about two points wind'ard, which signal reads: "Lay to and send a boat alongside." As soon as he had spanked the baby for being frightened, and had recovered from his own terror, Mr. Carmichel leaned far out of the window and peered eagerly into the fading moonlight. The yellow cat on the wood-shed gave two short howls and whetted its claws on a loose shingle, and unseen in the gloom below, another cruiser was heard grinding something on the curbstone, while it emitted two long howls and a short one. "Allah-ka-wow-yrow!" howled the yellow cat on the wood shed. "I am the five-clawed terror of the alley walk! I never sleep and my voice is the doom of death!" "Gitchee Monitow!" yelled the cat on the ground. "I am the wire-woven king of the roof, and the disturber of dreams! Ma-riar! I am the walking morgue of the back fence, and I carry my dead cart with me!" "Whoop!" shrieked the yellow cat on the wood-shed. "I'll tear down a ninety lumber pile if it lifts its back to me!" "Hush!" roared the cat in the dark, "I can wade across the Mississippi river when I'm right mad!" "Ifo!" screamed the yellow cat on the wood-shed. "I am the one eyed Gatling gun of the hill tops and the fiery untamed demon of the night time!" A bound as of rapid scrambling was heard, and a tall, slenderly built, but muscular, gentlemanly-looking cat, with an expression of reassuring confidence in its quiet eyes, stood on the shed roof and made a triumphal arch of itself. "And I," it said calmly, "am the night blooming serious and the gentle soothing syrup of the prairies." Without further preliminaries, the declaration of war was promulgated by both powers and the yellow cat crossed the Perth in two places. For one brief moment the moonlight was disturbed by a mass of hair, spherical in shape and about the size of a bushel and a half measure. And it did seem to Mr. Carmichel that he had never in his life beheld a cat so quickly, neatly, completely carved up, knocked down and dragged out, sat upon and dissected after the inquest as was the "one-eyed Gatling gun of the ???Unreadable??? proclamation of peace and declaring general amnesty of the same kind against the next cat that dare "holler" when he wants to talk, got down from the shed with hardly a scratch. Mr. Carmichel watched the champion, almost with a feeling of awe, as the brindle cat cautiously walked down the back yard until it reached the summer kitchen. Here it paused, and the astonished citizen, dumb with amazement, watched it unbuckle a pair of two inch gaffs from its hind legs and carefully hide them under the kitchen door step. "I'd like to see," the brindle cat remarked to himself, in tones of immense satisfaction and confidence. "I'd like to see the home bred cat that wants to occupy a pleasant roof with me. Thrice is he armed who -" And then the pleased victor broke off his soliloquy and sat under the lee of the kitchen and sang the "Hymn to the night" until four o'clock in the morning. But the song did not disturb Mr. Carmichel. He went to bed, but he was too full of wonder to sleep, and much he marveled on what he had seen and heard. - Hawkeye. |