Beautiful Joe

To George Thorndike Angell

President
of the American Humane Education Society, The Massachusetts Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the Parent American Band of Mercy, 19
Milk St., Boston.

This book is respectfully dedicated by the author.

Beautiful
Joe is a real dog, and “Beautiful Joe” is his real name. He belonged during the
first part of his life to a cruel master, who mutilated him in the manner
described in the story. He was rescued from him, and is now living in a happy
home with pleasant surroundings, and enjoys a wide local celebrity.

The
character of Laura is drawn from life, and to the smallest detail is truthfully
depicted. The Morris family has its counterparts in real life, and nearly all
of the incidents of the story are founded on fact.

The
wonderfully successful book, entitled
Black Beauty
, came like a living
voice out of the animal kingdom. But it spoke for the horse, and made other
books necessary; it led the way. After the ready welcome that it received, and
the good it has accomplished and is doing, it follows naturally that someone
should be inspired to write a book to interpret the life of a dog to the humane
feeling of the world. Such a story we have in
Beautiful Joe
.

The story
speaks not for the dog alone, but for the whole animal kingdom. Through it we
enter the animal world, and are made to see as animals see, and to feel as
animals feel. The sympathetic sight of the author, in this interpretation, is
ethically the strong feature of the book.

Such books
as this is one of the needs of our progressive system of education. The day school,
the Sunday school, and all libraries for the young, demand the influence that
shall
teach
the reader
how
to live in sympathy with the animal
world; how to understand the languages of the creatures that we have long been
accustomed to call “dumb,” and the sign language of the lower orders of these
dependent beings. The church owes it to her mission to preach and to teach the
enforcement of the “bird’s nest commandment;” the principle recognized by Moses
in the Hebrew world, and echoed by Cowper in English poetry, and Burns in the “Meadow
Mouse,” and by our own Longfellow in songs of many keys.

Kindness
to the animal kingdom is the first, or a first principle in the growth of true
philanthropy. Young Lincoln once waded across a half-frozen river to rescue a
dog, and stopped in a walk with a statesman to put back a bird that had fallen
out of its nest. Such a heart was trained to be a leader of men, and to be
crucified for a cause. The conscience that runs to the call of an animal in
distress is girding itself with power to do manly work in the world.

The story
of Beautiful Joe awakens an intense interest, and sustains it through a series
of vivid incidents and episodes, each of which is a lesson. The story merits
the widest circulation, and the universal reading and response accorded to Black
Beauty. To circulate it is to do good, to help the human heart as well as the
creatures of quick feelings and simple language.

When, as
one of the committee to examine the manuscripts offered for prizes to the
Humane Society, I read the story, I felt that the writer had a higher motive
than to compete for a prize; that the story was a stream of sympathy that
flowed from the heart; that it was genuine; that it only needed a publisher who
should be able to command a wide influence, to make its merits known, to give
it a strong educational mission.

I am
pleased that the manuscript has found such a publisher, and am sure that the
issue of the story will honor the Publication Society. In the development of
the book, I believe that the humane cause has stood above any speculative
thought or interest. The book comes because it is called for; the times demand
it. I think that the publishers have a right to ask for a little unselfish
service on the part of the public in helping to give it a circulation
commensurate with its opportunity, need, and influence.

Hezekiah Butterworth

(of the
committee of readers of the prize stories offered to the Humane Society)

Boston,
Mass.

My name is
Beautiful Joe, and I am a brown dog of medium size. I am not called Beautiful
Joe because I am a beauty. Mr. Morris, the clergyman, in whose family I have
lived for the last twelve years, says that he thinks I must be called Beautiful
Joe for the same reason that his grandfather, down South, called a very ugly coloured
slave-lad Cupid, and his mother Venus.

I do not
know what he means by that, but when he says it, people always look at me and
smile. I know that I am not beautiful, and I know that I am not a thoroughbred.
I am only a cur.

When my
mistress went every year to register me and pay my tax, and the man in the
office asked what breed I was, she said part fox terrier and part bull terrier;
but he always put me down a cur. I don’t think she liked having him call me a
cur; still, I have heard her say that she preferred curs, for they have more
character than well-bred dogs. Her father said that she liked ugly dogs for the
same reason that a nobleman at the court of a certain king did namely—that no
one else would.

I am an
old dog now, and am writing, or rather getting a friend to write, the story of
my life. I have seen my mistress laughing and crying over a little book that
she says is a story of a horse’s life, and sometimes she puts the book down
close to my nose to let me see the pictures.

I love my
dear mistress; I can say no more than that; I love her better than anyone else
in the world; and I think it will please her if I write the story of a dog’s
life. She loves dumb animals, and it always grieves her to see them treated
cruelly.

I have
heard her say that if all the boys and girls in the world were to rise up and
say that there should be no more cruelty to animals, they could put a stop to
it. Perhaps it will help a little if I tell a story. I am fond of boys and
girls, and though I have seen many cruel men and women, I have seen few cruel
children. I think the more stories there are written about dumb animals, the
better it will be for us.

In telling
my story, I think I had better begin at the first and come right on to the end.
I was born in a stable on the outskirts of a small town in Maine called
Fairport. The first thing I remember was lying close to my mother and being
very snug and warm. The next thing I remember was being always hungry. I had a
number of brothers and sisters—six in all—and my mother never had enough milk
for us. She was always half starved herself, so she could not feed us properly.

I am very
unwilling to say much about my early life. I have lived so long in a family
where there is never a harsh word spoken, and where no one thinks of
ill-treating anybody or anything; that it seems almost wrong even to think or
speak of such a matter as hurting a poor dumb beast.

The man
that owned my mother was a milkman. He kept one horse and three cows, and he
had a shaky old cart that he used to put his milk cans in. I don’t think there
can be a worse man in the world than that milkman. It makes me shudder now to
think of him. His name was Jenkins, and I am glad to think that he is getting
punished now for his cruelty to poor dumb animals and to human beings. If you
think it is wrong that I am glad, you must remember that I am only a dog.

The first
notice that he took of me when I was a little puppy, just able to stagger
about, was to give me a kick that sent me into a corner of the stable. He used
to beat and starve my mother. I have seen him use his heavy whip to punish her
till her body was covered with blood. When I got older I asked her why she did
not run away. She said she did not wish to; but I soon found out that the
reason she did not run away, was because she loved Jenkins. Cruel and savage as
he was, she yet loved him, and I believe she would have laid down her life for
him.

Now that I
am old, I know that there are more men in the world like Jenkins. They are not
crazy, they are not drunkards; they simply seem to be possessed with a spirit
of wickedness. There are well-to-do people, yes, and rich people, who will
treat animals, and even little children, with such terrible cruelty, that one
cannot even mention the things that they are guilty of.

One reason
for Jenkins’ cruelty was his idleness. After he went his rounds in the morning
with his milk cans, he had nothing to do till late in the afternoon but take
care of his stable and yard. If he had kept them neat, and groomed his horse,
and cleaned the cows, and dug up the garden, it would have taken up all his
time; but he never tidied the place at all, till his yard and stable got so
littered up with things he threw down that he could not make his way about.

His house
and stable stood in the middle of a large field, and they were at some distance
from the road. Passersby could not see how untidy the place was. Occasionally,
a man came to look at the premises, and see that they were in good order, but
Jenkins always knew when to expect him, and had things cleaned up a little.

I used to
wish that some of the people that took milk from him would come and look at his
cows. In the spring and summer he drove them out to pasture, but during the
winter they stood all the time in the dirty, dark stable, where the chinks in
the wall were so big that the snow swept through almost in drifts. The ground
was always muddy and wet; there was only one small window on the north side,
where the sun only shone in for a short time in the afternoon.

They were
very unhappy cows, but they stood patiently and never complained, though
sometimes I know they must have nearly frozen in the bitter winds that blew
through the stable on winter nights. They were lean and poor, and were never in
good health. Besides being cold they were fed on very poor food.

Jenkins
used to come home nearly every afternoon with a great tub in the back of his
cart that was full of what he called “peelings.” It was kitchen stuff that he
asked the cooks at the different houses where he delivered milk, to save for
him. They threw rotten vegetables, fruit parings, and scraps from the table
into a tub, and gave them to him at the end of a few days. A sour, nasty mess
it always was, and not fit to give any creature.

Sometimes,
when he had not many “peelings,” he would go to town and get a load of decayed
vegetables, that grocers were glad to have him take off their hands.

This food,
together with poor hay, made the cows give very poor milk, and Jenkins used to
put some white powder in it, to give it “body,” as he said.

Once a
very sad thing happened about the milk, that no one knew about but Jenkins and
his wife. She was a poor, unhappy creature, very frightened at her husband, and
not daring to speak much to him. She was not a clean woman, and I never saw a
worse-looking house than she kept.

She used
to do very queer things, that I know now no housekeeper should do. I have seen
her catch up the broom to pound potatoes in the pot. She pounded with the
handle, and the broom would fly up and down in the air, dropping dust into the
pot where the potatoes were. Her pan of soft-mixed bread she often left
uncovered in the kitchen, and sometimes the hens walked in and sat in it.

The
children used to play in mud puddles about the door. It was the youngest of
them that sickened with some kind of fever early in the spring, before Jenkins
began driving the cows out to pasture. The child was very ill, and Mrs. Jenkins
wanted to send for a doctor, but her husband would not let her. They made a bed
in the kitchen, close to the stove, and Mrs. Jenkins nursed the child as best
she could. She did all her work nearby, and I saw her several times wiping the
child’s face with the cloth that she used for washing her milk pans.

Nobody
knew outside the family that the little girl was ill. Jenkins had such a bad
name, that none of the neighbors would visit them. By-and-by the child got
well, and a week or two later Jenkins came home with quite a frightened face,
and told his wife that the husband of one of his customers was very ill with
typhoid fever.

After a
time the gentleman died, and the cook told Jenkins that the doctor wondered how
he could have taken the fever, for there was not a case in town.

There was
a widow left with three orphans, and they never knew that they had to blame a
dirty careless milkman for taking a kind husband and father from them.