ogether," said Kraft, with a grin.

MEMOIRS OF A YELLOW DOG

I don't suppose it will knock any of you people off your perch to read
a contribution from an animal. Mr. Kipling and a good many others
have demonstrated the fact that animals can express themselves in
remunerative English, and no magazine goes to press nowadays without
an animal story in it, except the old-style monthlies that are still
running pictures of Bryan and the Mont Pelee horror.

But you needn't look for any stuck-up literature in my piece, such as
Bearoo, the bear, and Snakoo, the snake, and Tammanoo, the tiger, talk
in the jungle books. A yellow dog that's spent most of his life in a
cheap New York flat, sleeping in a corner on an old sateen underskirt
(the one she spilled port wine on at the Lady Longshoremen's banquet),
mustn't be expected to perform any tricks with the art of speech.

I was born a yellow pup; date, locality, pedigree and weight unknown.
The first thing I can recollect, an old woman had me in a basket
at Broadway and Twenty-third trying to sell me to a fat lady.
Old Mother Hubbard was boosting me to beat the band as a genuine
Pomeranian-Hambletonian-Red-Irish-Cochin-China-Stoke-Pogis fox
terrier. The fat lady chased a V around among the samples of gros grain
flannelette in her shopping bag till she cornered it, and gave up. From
that moment I was a pet--a mamma's own wootsey squidlums. Say, gentle
reader, did you ever have a 200-pound woman breathing a flavour of
Camembert cheese and Peau d'Espagne pick you up and wallop her nose all
over you, remarking all the time in an Emma Eames tone of voice: "Oh,
oo's um oodlum, doodlum, woodlum, toodlum, bitsy-witsy skoodlums?"

From a pedigreed yellow pup I grew up to be an anonymous yellow cur
looking like a cross between an Angora cat and a box of lemons. But my
mistress never tumbled. She thought that the two primeval pups that Noah
chased into the ark were but a collateral branch of my ancestors. It
took two policemen to keep her from entering me at the Madison Square
Garden for the Siberian bloodhound prize.

I'll tell you about that flat. The house was the ordinary thing in New
York, paved with Parian marble in the entrance hall and cobblestones
above the first floor. Our fiat was three--well, not flights--climbs up.
My mistress rented it unfurnished, and put in the regular things--1903
antique unholstered parlour set, oil chromo of geishas in a Harlem tea
house, r