of his own kind. He learned early that for a black dog with long
silky ears, a feathered tail, and head of great dignity, there was no
home whatsoever, away from those creatures with special scents, who took
liberties with his name, and alone of all created things were privileged
to smack him with a slipper. He would sleep anywhere, so long as it was
in their room, or so close outside it as to make no matter, for it was
with him a principle that what he did not smell did not exist. I would I
could hear again those long rubber-lipped snufflings of recognition
underneath the door, with which each morning he would regale and reassure
a spirit that grew with age more and more nervous and delicate about this
matter of propinquity! For he was a dog of fixed ideas, things stamped
on his mind were indelible; as, for example, his duty toward cats, for
whom he had really a perverse affection, which had led to that first
disastrous moment of his life, when he was brought up, poor bewildered
puppy, from a brief excursion to the kitchen, with one eye closed and his
cheek torn! He bore to his grave that jagged scratch across the eye. It
was in dread of a repetition of this tragedy that he was instructed at
the word "Cats" to rush forward with a special "tow-row-rowing," which he
never used toward any other form of creature. To the end he cherished a
hope that he would reach the cat; but never did; and if he had, we knew
he would only have stood and wagged his tail; but I well remember once,
when he returned, important, from some such sally, how dreadfully my
companion startled a cat-loving friend by murmuring in her most honeyed
voice: "Well, my darling, have you been killing pussies in the garden?"

His eye and nose were impeccable in their sense of form; indeed, he was
very English in that matter: People must be just so; things smell
properly; and affairs go on in the one right way. He could tolerate
neither creatures in ragged clothes, nor children on their hands and
knees, nor postmen, because, with their bags, they swelled-up on one
side, and carried lanterns on their stomachs. He would never let the
harmless creatures pass without religious barks. Naturally a believer in
authority and routine, and distrusting spiritual adventure, he yet had
curious fads that seemed to have nested in him, quite outside of all
principle. He would, for instance, follow neither carriages nor horses,
and if we tried to make him, at once le