gh. Those sighs of a dog! They go to the heart so much
more deeply than the sighs of our own kind, because they are utterly
unintended, regardless of effect, emerging from one who, heaving them,
knows not that they have escaped him!

The words: "Yes--going too!" spoken in a certain tone, would call up in
his eyes a still-questioning half-happiness, and from his tail a quiet
flutter, but did not quite serve to put to rest either his doubt or his
feeling that it was all unnecessary--until the cab arrived. Then he
would pour himself out of door or window, and be found in the bottom of
the vehicle, looking severely away from an admiring cabman. Once settled
on our feet he travelled with philosophy, but no digestion.

I think no dog was ever more indifferent to an outside world of human
creatures; yet few dogs have made more conquests--especially among
strange women, through whom, however, he had a habit of looking--very
discouraging. He had, natheless, one or two particular friends, such as
him to whom this book is dedicated, and a few persons whom he knew he had
seen before, but, broadly speaking, there were in his world of men, only
his mistress, and--the almighty.

Each August, till he was six, he was sent for health, and the assuagement
of his hereditary instincts, up to a Scotch shooting, where he carried
many birds in a very tender manner. Once he was compelled by Fate to
remain there nearly a year; and we went up ourselves to fetch him home.
Down the long avenue toward the keeper's cottage we walked: It was high
autumn; there had been frost already, for the ground was fine with red
and yellow leaves; and presently we saw himself coming; professionally
questing among those leaves, and preceding his dear keeper with the
businesslike self-containment of a sportsman; not too fat, glossy as a
raven's wing, swinging his ears and sporran like a little Highlander. We
approached him silently. Suddenly his nose went up from its imagined
trail, and he came rushing at our legs. From him, as a garment drops
from a man, dropped all his strange soberness; he became in a single
instant one fluttering eagerness. He leaped from life to life in one
bound, without hesitation, without regret. Not one sigh, not one look
back, not the faintest token of gratitude or regret at leaving those good
people who had tended him for a whole year, buttered oat-cake for him,
allowed him to choose each night exactly where he would sleep. No