Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 March 1887 — Animals Love Lavender. [ARTICLE]

Animals Love Lavender.

A short cut to the heart of any of the large felidie is to he found in lavender water, a fact which I discovered by accident. The late Mrs. Lee, whose leopard “Sal” was an interesting inmate of her household, trained the animal almost wholly by taking advantage of its love for this perfume. So, wanting to be on good terms with the leopard “Old Man,” I took some lavender water with me. Before giving it to the leopard, I thought that I would try the effect on “Bessy,” a fine tigress, who has for sometime been very gracious in her conduct toward me. I poured a few drops of the perfume on a small piece of brown paper, and held it to her. She first gave a prolonged sniff, and then scraped the paper out of my. hand, and laid it on the floor of the cage. First, she sniffed at it repeatedly, raising her nose high in the air after every sniff. Then slie tore it into little pieces, which she strewed over the floor. Then she rolled over and over on the perfumed fragments, giving a series of muffled yelps of delight, and then began leaping all over the cage, springing up until her head struck against the roof, turhing over in the air, and coming ' down oh the boarded floor with a mighty thump, as might be expected from an animal weighing more than three hundred pounds. Next, I" tried the effect on the leopard “Old Man,” who occupied the next cage, and found that he was even more powerfully affected than the tigress, slobbering over the perfume until the floor of the cage was quite wet, and rolling over and over, exactly as liis neighbor had done. Meantime “Empress,” who occupied a cage on the opposite of the building, had scented the lavender jvater from a distance,and was loudly expressing her opinion that she had been shamefully neglected. So I gave her a liberal dose of the perfume, and she, being only a’young thing, and unaccustomed to self-control, straightway proceeded to go mad over it .—The Rev. J. G. Wood, in “Little Snow Flakes."