h to find a green curtain to be drawn across it. From behind
this screen he now emerged and bowed. The bow redoubled the first
conventional applause. He then began a very short address,--extremely
well delivered, as you may suppose, but rather in the conversational
than the oratorical style. He said it was his object to exhibit the
intelligence of that Universal Friend of Man, the Dog, in some
manner appropriate, not only to its sagacious instincts, but to its
affectionate nature, and to convey thereby the moral that talents,
however great, learning, however deep, were of no avail, unless rendered
serviceable to Man. (Applause.) He must be pardoned then, if, in order
to effect this object, he was compelled to borrow some harmless effects
from the stage. In a word, his dog could represent to them the plot of
a little drama. And he, though he could not say that he was altogether
unaccustomed to public speaking (here a smile, modest, but august as
that of some famous parliamentary orator who makes his first appearance
at a vestry), still wholly new to its practice in the special part he
had undertaken, would rely on their indulgence to efforts aspiring to
no other merit than that of aiding the Hero of the Piece in a familiar
illustration of those qualities in which dogs might give a lesson to
humanity. Again he bowed, and retired behind the curtain. A pause of
three minutes! the curtain drew up. Could that be the same Mr. Chapman
whom the spectators beheld before them? Could three minutes suffice to
change the sleek, respectable, prosperous-looking gentleman who had just
addressed them into that image of threadbare poverty and hunger-pinched
dejection? Little aid from theatrical costume: the clothes seemed the
same, only to have grown wondrous aged and rusty. The face, the figure,
the man,--these had undergone a transmutation beyond the art of the mere
stage wardrobe, be it ever so amply stored, to effect. But for the patch
over the eye, you could not have recognized Mr. Chapman. There was,
indeed, about him, still, an air of dignity; but it was the dignity of
woe,--a dignity, too, not of an affable civilian, but of some veteran
soldier. You could not mistake. Though not in uniform, the melancholy
man must have been a warrior! The way the coat was buttoned across the
chest, the black stock tightened round the throat, the shoulders thrown
back in the disciplined habit of a life, though the head bent forward
in the despondency