Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems
[Illustration] LAYS OF THE SCOTTISH CAVALIERS BY W.E. AYTOUN. TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE ARCHIBALD WILLIAM HAMILTON-MONTGOMERIE, Earl of Eglinton and Winton, THE PATRIOTIC AND NOBLE REPRESENTATIVE OF
the ones he used to give me.
I'll not talk about such a painful subject any longer, but you may be
sure that I was glad when something happened to the show. The owner
lost all his money, and had to sell his animals and go out of the
business. After that I had a very comfortable winter in a zoological
garden out West, near where we stranded. Then an old white-haired man
from California bought me to add to his private collection of monkeys.
He had half a dozen or so in his high-walled garden.
It was a beautiful place, hot and sunny like my old home, and full of
palm-trees and tangled vines and brilliant flowers. The most beautiful
thing in it was a great rose-tree which he called Gold of Ophir. It
shook its petals into a splashing fountain where goldfish were always
swimming around and around, and it was hard to tell which was the
brightest, the falling rose-leaves, or the tiny goldfish flashing by
in the sun.
There was a lady who used to lie in a hammock under the roses every
day and smile at my antics. She was young, I remember, and very
pretty, but her face was as white as the marble mermaid in the
fountain. The old gentleman and his wife always sat beside her when
she lay in the hammock. Sometimes he read aloud, sometimes they
talked, and sometimes a long silence would fall upon them, when the
splashing of the fountain and the droning of the bees would be the
only sound anywhere in the garden.
[Illustration] LAYS OF THE SCOTTISH CAVALIERS BY W.E. AYTOUN. TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE ARCHIBALD WILLIAM HAMILTON-MONTGOMERIE, Earl of Eglinton and Winton, THE PATRIOTIC AND NOBLE REPRESENTATIVE OF