The
dog went round behind them, and, putting his feet upon the chair,
lifted Robert's arm off her shoulder with his nose, giving an
intimation that he would not permit any liberty of that kind even from
him. They had a favorite cat, to which the dog had the usual antipathy
of dogs, and one day he chased her under a cupboard, and, unable to
reach her, kept her there besieged and unable to escape, till Mrs.
Browning intervened and gave the dog a lecture, in which she told him
of their attachment for the cat, and charged him never to molest her
more. If the creature had understood speech he could not have obeyed
better; for from that time he was never known to molest the cat, and
she, taking her revenge for past tyranny, bore herself most insolently
with him, and when she scratched him over the head he only whimpered
and turned away, as if to avoid temptation. An injury to one of his
feet made an operation necessary, and the family surgeon was called
in to perform it, but found him so savage that he could not touch the
foot or approach him. Mrs. Browning came and talked to him in her
way, and the dog submitted at once, without a whimper, to the painful
operation. She had been long dead when I knew the family.

We had planned to go together--the elder Browning, Robert and Mrs.
Browning, Miss Browning, my wife, and myself--to pass the summer at
Fontainebleau, and we were awaiting the arrival of Robert and his wife
from Florence when the news came of Mrs. Browning's illness, followed
not much later by that of her death. The intrusion even of a friend
was too much for this catastrophe, and we saw little more of the
Brownings until years after, when other and many changes of fortune
had come over us, and we met again in Italy.

Out of a quiet and happy life in Normandy I was aroused by the
complications of our Civil War. An intimate friend living in Paris,
the late Colonel W.B. Greene, a graduate of West Point, had applied
for the command of a regiment of Massachusetts troops, and offered me
a position on his staff if he got it and I would come. We agreed to go
together, but his impatience carried him away, and he sailed without
giving me notice. I followed by the next steamer, and, leaving my wife
with my parents, I went on to Washington and to Greene's headquarters.
I was too late for Greene, and I could not pass the medical
examination, which was then very rigid, for all the North was
volunteering. "Go home," said Greene;