bout him, recalling his virtues, and remembering
with tears how one day they lost him for two whole hours, on which
occasion he was brought home in a most brutal manner by the butcher-boy,
who had been met carrying him by the scruff of his neck with one hand,
while soundly cuffing his head with the other.

After recovering from these bitter recollections, they vie with each
other in bursts of admiration for the brute, until some more than
usually enthusiastic member, unable any longer to control his feelings,
swoops down upon the unhappy quadruped in a frenzy of affection,
clutches it to his heart, and slobbers over it. Whereupon the others,
mad with envy, rise up, and seizing as much of the dog as the greed of
the first one has left to them, murmur praise and devotion.

Among these people everything is done through the dog. If you want to
make love to the eldest daughter, or get the old man to lend you
the garden roller, or the mother to subscribe to the Society for the
Suppression of Solo-Cornet Players in Theatrical Orchestras (it's a pity
there isn't one, anyhow), you have to begin with the dog. You must
gain its approbation before they will even listen to you, and if, as is
highly probable, the animal, whose frank, doggy nature has been warped
by the unnatural treatment he has received, responds to your overtures
of friendship by viciously snapping at you, your cause is lost forever.

"If Fido won't take to any one," the father has thoughtfully remarked
beforehand, "I say that man is not to be trusted. You know, Maria, how
often I have said that. Ah! he knows, bless him."

Drat him!

And to think that the surly brute was once an innocent puppy, all legs
and head, full of fun and play, and burning with ambition to become a
big, good dog and bark like mother.

Ah me! life sadly changes us all. The world seems a vast horrible
grinding machine, into which what is fresh and bright and pure is pushed
at one end, to come out old and crabbed and wrinkled at the other.

Look even at Pussy Sobersides, with her dull, sleepy glance, her grave,
slow walk, and dignified, prudish airs; who could ever think that once
she was the blue-eyed, whirling, scampering, head-over-heels, mad little
firework that we call a kitten?

What marvelous vitality a kitten has. It is really something very
beautiful the way life bubbles over in the little creatures. They rush
about, and mew, and spring; dance on their hind legs, embrace everyt