better to say nothing. Moreover, as Murphy duly
remarked, while we talked over the wonderful doings of many and many a
dog now lying in this sacred corner, "What could you possibly have
expected in such a case, and from one of Us that you had wilfully named
Scamp?"

There was, of course, something in that, and many of Scamp's acts
deserved to be recorded, though this is no place for doing so. At one
time he was in London. Residence there naturally put a limit to the
exercise of his sporting instincts, but he developed others to replace
them. He was sometimes absent all day, to be found at the door at night;
and on one occasion he met his master at a City railway station, when
thought to have been lost for good and all--was indeed seen by his master
to be making his way thither as he drove into the station yard in
question.

To have done anything so clever as that might have been thought to have
earned the right to headstone and epitaph in full. Yet his resting-place
remains unmarked, and his name apparently dogged him to the end, and past
it.

"What was that about _De mortuis_?" came the question from Murphy.

"_Nil nisi bonum._"

"That never should have been raised, in his case. What about _De vivis_?"
There was indignation in the tone; perhaps justly.

IX

"What I does is this--what I does is, I gets 'em quite close to me, and
then I talks to 'em."

This is what Mrs. Pinnix invariably replied, when asked how it was that
her children were of such good behaviour and gave so little trouble. And
Mrs. Pinnix knew, for she had been the careful mother of thirteen, and
had developed this happy, good-natured method of dealing with each in
turn, boys and girls alike. No doubt she was a remarkable woman in many
ways, for she won the last event on the card at the time of the Jubilee
sports, being then the mother of ten--"Skipping: open to mothers only."
But the point here, in this remark of hers, is that a long experience
with dogs shows the talking treatment to be as applicable to them as it
was to Mrs. Pinnix's children.

Nor will this be found to be the fanciful idea of the few, if inquiry be
made. To live largely, for instance, among those whose labours lie far
from cities, and who, of long habit, have come to note many things
concerning which the less fortunate townsman knows nothing, is to learn
many things oneself. To hazard the remark in such quarters, that a good
man