tail; but I well remember once,
when he returned, important, from some such sally, how dreadfully my
companion startled a cat-loving friend by murmuring in her most honeyed
voice: "Well, my darling, have you been killing pussies in the garden?"

His eye and nose were impeccable in their sense of form; indeed, he was
very English in that matter: People must be just so; things smell
properly; and affairs go on in the one right way. He could tolerate
neither creatures in ragged clothes, nor children on their hands and
knees, nor postmen, because, with their bags, they swelled-up on one
side, and carried lanterns on their stomachs. He would never let the
harmless creatures pass without religious barks. Naturally a believer in
authority and routine, and distrusting spiritual adventure, he yet had
curious fads that seemed to have nested in him, quite outside of all
principle. He would, for instance, follow neither carriages nor horses,
and if we tried to make him, at once left for home, where he would sit
with nose raised to Heaven, emitting through it a most lugubrious, shrill
noise. Then again, one must not place a stick, a slipper, a glove, or
anything with which he could play, upon one's head--since such an action
reduced him at once to frenzy. For so conservative a dog, his
environment was sadly anarchistic. He never complained in words of our
shifting habits, but curled his head round over his left paw and pressed
his chin very hard against the ground whenever he smelled packing. What
necessity, he seemed continually to be saying, what real necessity is
there for change of any kind whatever? Here we were all together, and
one day was like another, so that I knew where I was--and now you only
know what will happen next; and I--I can't tell you whether I shall be
with you when it happens! What strange, grieving minutes a dog passes at
such times in the underground of his subconsciousness, refusing
realisation, yet all the time only too well divining. Some careless
word, some unmuted compassion in voice, the stealthy wrapping of a pair
of boots, the unaccustomed shutting of a door that ought to be open, the
removal from a down-stair room of an object always there--one tiny thing,
and he knows for certain that he is not going too. He fights against the
knowledge just as we do against what we cannot bear; he gives up hope,
but not effort, protesting in the only way he knows of, and now and then
heaving a great si