normal goat could desire--a rustic stable, a green lawn, the best of
food. Yet Rachael pined and grew thinner and thinner. One night when we
were all sitting at dinner, with the French windows open onto the lawn
because it was a hot night, Rachael came prancing into the room, looking
happy, lively, and quite at home. All the time, while Charles Reade had
been fashing himself to provide every sort of rural joy for his goat,
the ungrateful beast had been longing for the naphtha lights of the
circus, for lively conversation and the applause of the crowd.

You can't force a goat any more than you can force a child to live the
simple life. "N'Yawk's the place," said the child of a Bowery tenement
in New York, on the night of her return from an enforced sojourn in
Arcady. She hated picking daisies, and drinking rich new milk made her
sick. When the kind teacher who had brought her to the country strove to
impress her by taking her to see a cow milked, she remarked witheringly
to the man who was milking: "Gee! You put it in!"

Rachael's sentiments were of the same type, I think. "Back to the
circus!" was his cry, not "Back to the land!"

I hope, when he felt the sawdust under his feet again (I think Charles
Reade sent him back to the ring), he remembered his late master with
gratitude. To how many animals, and not only four-footed ones, was not
Charles Reade generously kind, and to none of them more kind than to
Ellen Terry.




V