my private
school, reading "Tales of a Grandfather," and plied with tracts and
sherry by my 'father's man of business.

That night, indeed, for several nights, he slept with me, keeping me too
warm down my back, and waking me now and then with quaint sleepy
whimperings. Indeed, all through his life he flew a good deal in his
sleep, fighting dogs and seeing ghosts, running after rabbits and thrown
sticks; and to the last one never quite knew whether or no to rouse him
when his four black feet began to jerk and quiver. His dreams were like
our dreams, both good and bad; happy sometimes, sometimes tragic to
weeping point.

He ceased to sleep with me the day we discovered that he was a perfect
little colony, whose settlers were of an active species which I have
never seen again. After that he had many beds, for circumstance ordained
that his life should be nomadic, and it is to this I trace that
philosophic indifference to place or property, which marked him out from
most of his own kind. He learned early that for a black dog with long
silky ears, a feathered tail, and head of great dignity, there was no
home whatsoever, away from those creatures with special scents, who took
liberties with his name, and alone of all created things were privileged
to smack him with a slipper. He would sleep anywhere, so long as it was
in their room, or so close outside it as to make no matter, for it was
with him a principle that what he did not smell did not exist. I would I
could hear again those long rubber-lipped snufflings of recognition
underneath the door, with which each morning he would regale and reassure
a spirit that grew with age more and more nervous and delicate about this
matter of propinquity! For he was a dog of fixed ideas, things stamped
on his mind were indelible; as, for example, his duty toward cats, for
whom he had really a perverse affection, which had led to that first
disastrous moment of his life, when he was brought up, poor bewildered
puppy, from a brief excursion to the kitchen, with one eye closed and his
cheek torn! He bore to his grave that jagged scratch across the eye. It
was in dread of a repetition of this tragedy that he was instructed at
the word "Cats" to rush forward with a special "tow-row-rowing," which he
never used toward any other form of creature. To the end he cherished a
hope that he would reach the cat; but never did; and if he had, we knew
he would only have stood and wagged his