Shunned Social Gatherings
Whenever this cask arrived, or when there came a box from Mt. Sinai filled with potato-like sweetmeats,--a paste of figs, dates, and nuts, stuffed into sewed goatskins,--or when his hens had been laying a goodly number of eggs, then under the blue cloak a selection of bottles, or of sweetmeats, or of eggs would be borne to a friend's house, where for an hour the old man sat in dignity, and calm, opening and closing his eyes and his jack-knife; uttering meanwhile detached remarks, wise, gruff, biting, yet seldom lacking a kernal of kindness, till bedtime came, nine o'clock, and he was gone, the gifts--if thanks were feared--left in a chair by the door.
There were half a dozen houses and dinner tables in Cambridge to which he went with pleasure, houses where he seemed to find a solace in the neighborhood of his kind. But human beings were an exceptional luxury. He had never learned to expect them. They never became necessities of his daily life, and I doubt if he missed them when they were absent.
Nursed Bantams--Frank and Nina
But his solitary heart went out most unreservedly and with the most pathetic devotion toward fragile chickens; and out of these uninteresting little birds he elicited a degree of responsive intelligence which was starting to see. One of his dearest friends, coming home from a journey, brought him a couple of bantam eggs.
When hatched and grown, they developed into a little five-inch burnished cock, which shone like a jewel or a bird of paradise, and a more sober but exquisite hen. These two, Frank and Nina, and all their numerous progeny for many years, Sophocles trained to the hand. Each knew its name, and would run from the flock when its white-haired keeper called, and, sitting upon his hand or shoulder, would show queer signs of affection, not hesitating even to crow.
The eggs, as soon as laid, were penciled with the date and the name of the mother, and were then distributed among his friends, or sparingly eaten at his own meals. To eat a chicken itself was a kind of cannibalism from which his whole nature shrank. "I do not eat what I love," he said, rejecting the bowl of chicken broth I pressed upon him in his last sickness.