d pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man
shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an
art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the affection warms and
strengthens till it fills the soul. But doubtless, also, the masters
are, in many cases, the object of a merely interested cultus, sitting
aloft like Louis Quatorze giving and receiving flattery and favour; and
the dogs, like the majority of men, have but foregone their true
existence and become the dupes of their ambition.

FOOTNOTE:

[15] Walter, Watty, Woggy, Woggs, Wogg, and lastly Bogue; under which
last name he fell in battle some twelve months ago. Glory was his
aim, and he attained it; for his icon, by the hand of Caldecott, now
lies among the treasures of the nation at the British Museum.

XIII

A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED

These words will be familiar to all students of Skelt's Juvenile Drama.
That national monument, after having changed its name to Park's, to
Webb's, to Redington's, and last of all to Pollock's, has now become,
for the most part, a memory. Some of its pillars, like Stonehenge, are
still afoot, the rest clean vanished. In may be the Museum numbers a
full set; and Mr. Ionides perhaps, or else her gracious Majesty, may
boast their great collections; but to the plain private person they are
become, like Raphaels, unattainable. I have, at different times,
possessed _Aladdin_, _The Red Rover_, _The Blind Boy_, _The Old Oak
Chest_, _The Wood Daemon_, _Jack Sheppard_, _The Miller and his Men_,
_Der Freischuetz_, _The Smuggler_, _The Forest of Bondy_, _Robin Hood_,
_The Waterman_, _Richard I._, _My Poll and my Partner Joe_, _The
Inchcape Bell_ (imperfect), and _Three-Fingered Jack_, _The Terror of
Jamaica_; and I have assisted others in the illumination of _The Maid of
the Inn_ and _The Battle of Waterloo_. In this roll-call of stirring
names you read the evidences of a happy childhood; and though not half
of them are still to be procured of any living stationer, in the mind of
their once happy owner all survive, kaleidoscopes of changing pictures,
echoes of the past.

There stands, I fancy, to this day (but now how fallen!) a certain
stationer's shop at a corner of the wide thoroughfare that joins the
city of my childhood with the sea. When, upon any Saturday, we made a
party to behold the ships, we passed that corner; and since in those
days I loved a ship as a man l