es thanks them. There is no harm and some good in letting our
sympathy and affection go forth without stint on such objects, dead and
homely though they be.

When I think of that noble head, with its look and eye of boundless
affection and pluck, simplicity and single-heartedness, I feel what it
would be for us, who call ourselves the higher animals, to be in our
ways as simple, affectionate, and true, as that old mastiff; and in the
highest of all senses, I often think of what Robert Burns says
somewhere, "Man is the god of the dog." It would be well for man if his
worship were as immediate and instinctive--as absolute as the dog's. Did
we serve our God with half the zeal Rab served his, we might trust to
sleep as peacefully in our graves as he does in his. When James turned
his angry eye and raised his quick voice and foot, his worshipper slunk
away, humbled and afraid, angry with himself for making _him_ angry;
anxious by any means to crouch back into his favor, and a kind look or
word. Is that the way we take His displeasure, even when we can't think,
as Rab couldn't, we were immediately to blame? It is, as the old worthy
says, something to trust our God in the dark, as the dog does his.

A dear and wise and exquisite child, drew a plan for a headstone on the
grave of a favorite terrier, and she had in it the words "WHO died" on
such a day; the older and more worldly-minded painter put in "WHICH;"
and my friend and "Bossy's" said to me, with some displeasure, as we
were examining the monuments, "Wasn't he a Who as much as they?" and
wasn't she righter than they? and

"Quis desiderio sit aut pudor aut modus
Tam cari capitis"--

as that of "Rab."

With regard to the quotations--and the much Latin and some Greek, the
world of men, and especially of women, is dead against me. I am sorry
for it. As he said, who was reminded in an argument that the facts were
against him, "So much the worse for them," and I may add for me. Latin
and Greek are not dead--in one sense, they are happily immortal; but the
present age is doing its worst to kill them, and much of their own best
good and pleasure.

23, RUTLAND STREET,
_October 13, 1859_.

_RAB AND HIS FRIENDS._

_To MY TWO FRIENDS
at Busby, Renfrewshire,
In Remembrance of a Journey from Carstairs Junction
to Toledo and back,
The Story of "Rab and his Fri