ifelong inability to get out of the way of
traffic on the roads, which made walks along roads very rare occurrences
indeed, and many others of a like nature. Had it been otherwise, where
would have been the training for both? On the one hand, there was always
the ideal of enabling this dog to regain confidence in the human being,
and making him the merry, happy fellow he had once been; on the other,
there was the test as to whether this could be done without loss of hope
in the face of repeated and almost continuous failure, and without the
exhibition of irritability or loss of temper when provocations arose at
first a score of times on every day.

Of his pluck there was never the slightest question. Again and again he
would charge, for instance, into a quickset hedge when his nose told him
a rat was there, and come out a mass of thorns, and with the rat fixed to
his lip or cheek. He would then simply knock the rat off with a fore-paw
without whimpering, and hold it down that some one else might come and
kill it, for he seemed unable, or unwilling, to kill anything himself.
Then, again, he habitually went straight up to the most savage of
dogs--several times at the risk of his life, in the case of well-known
fighters twice the size of himself--and by his manner or his charm
invariably came away harmless.

He could never be made to understand--and it is the cause of shame now to
realise the irritation that this caused on many an occasion--that all the
dogs in the world, any more than other inhabitants of the world, are not
necessarily our friends, or intend even to be friendly; and that dogs,
like those about them, are frequently in the habit of quarrelling and
rending one another without regard to feelings, and with little of the
spirit of give and take that life and a common lot might elsewhere be
said to demand.

He was often told these things, but if, as with many of his kind, he
looked as if he understood, he never really doubted to the end that other
dogs were at least, and of necessity, his friends. He did not court their
company. They often seemed to bore him, and more and more the older he
grew; but he had a curious way of inviting some to his house, and it was
no uncommon occurrence to find a strange dog lying in the morning in the
hall that he had sometimes brought a long distance.

Of his hospitality in this way he once gave a remarkable instance. A
neighbour's dog was of uncertain manners, to dogs and men