ng-horse. My St. Bernard dog accompanied me, though I have always
been diffident of taking him to toy-shops, which over-excite him.
Hitherto the toys I had bought had always been for him, and as we durst
not admit this to the saleswoman we were both horribly self-conscious
when in the shop. A score of times I have told him that he had much
better not come, I have announced fiercely that he is not to come. He
then lets go of his legs, which is how a St. Bernard sits down, making
the noise of a sack of coals suddenly deposited, and, laying his head
between his front paws, stares at me through the red haws that make his
eyes so mournful. He will do this for an hour without blinking, for he
knows that in time it will unman me. My dog knows very little, but what
little he does know he knows extraordinarily well. One can get out of my
chambers by a back way, and I sometimes steal softly--but I can't
help looking back, and there he is, and there are those haws asking
sorrowfully, "Is this worthy of you?"

"Curse you," I say, "get your hat," or words to that effect.

He has even been to the club, where he waddles up the stairs so exactly
like some respected member that he makes everybody most uncomfortable.
I forget how I became possessor of him. I think I cut him out of an old
number of Punch. He costs me as much as an eight-roomed cottage in the
country.

He was a full-grown dog when I first, most foolishly, introduced him
to toys. I had bought a toy in the street for my own amusement. It
represented a woman, a young mother, flinging her little son over her
head with one hand and catching him in the other, and I was entertaining
myself on the hearth-rug with this pretty domestic scene when I heard
an unwonted sound from Porthos, and, looking up, I saw that noble and
melancholic countenance on the broad grin. I shuddered and was for
putting the toy away at once, but he sternly struck down my arm with
his, and signed that I was to continue. The unmanly chuckle always
came, I found, when the poor lady dropped her babe, but the whole thing
entranced him; he tried to keep his excitement down by taking huge
draughts of water; he forgot all his niceties of conduct; he sat in holy
rapture with the toy between his paws, took it to bed with him, ate it
in the night, and searched for it so longingly next day that I had to go
out and buy him the man with the scythe. After that we had everything of
note, the bootblack boy, the toper wit