The dog we have always with us; if not active in the garden or passive on the best bed, then gracing or disgracing himself in other domestic capacities. For the dog is a curious combination, wherein heredity constantly opposes culture; and therefore though your dog be a woolly dog or a smooth dog, a large dog or a small dog, a house-dog, yard-dog, hunting-dog or farm-dog, he will be ever a delight and a scandal according as he reveals the complexities of his character. Just as soon as you have decided that he is almost human, he will straightway unmistakably indicate that he is still very much dog.

As example, select, if you please, the most pampered and carefully nurtured dog in dog tribe: some lady\'s dog—beribboned King Charles, bejeweled poodle, befatted pug—and give him the luxury of a half-hour in the nearest genuine alley. Do you think that he turns up his delicate nose at the luscious smells there encountered? Do you think that because of his repeated scented baths he sedulously keeps to the middle of the narrow way? Do you venture to assert that he whose jaded palate has recently declined the breast of chicken is now nauseated by the prodigal waste encountered amidst the garbage cans?

Fie on him, the ingrate! Why, the little rascal fairly revels in the riot of débris, and ten to one he will even proudly return lugging the most unsavoury of bones filched from a particularly odorous repository! His lapse into atavism has been prompt and certain. I agree with Robert Louis Stevenson that every dog is a vagabond at heart; in adapting himself to the companionship of man and woman, and the comforts of board and lodging, he leads a double life.

In this respect the dog is far more servile than the cat, his contemporary. Generations of attempted coercion have little influenced the cat. She (it seems a proper distinction to speak of the cat as "she") steadfastly maintains the distance that shall divide cat life from man life. Without duress, and in spite of duress, she accepts the material favors of civilization and domesticity only to an extent that will not inconvenience her; she has no notion of responsibilities or indebtedness. Having achieved her demands for a warm nap or a full stomach, she then makes no false motions in following her own inclinations entirely. But the dog, occupying a limbo between his natural instincts and his acquired conscience, must always be a master of duplicity.

The dog (as again points out the admirable Stevenson) has become an accomplished actor. Observe his ceremonious approach to other dogs. Mark the mutual dignity, the stiff-leggedness, the self-conscious strut, the rivalrous emulation, all of which plainly says: "I am Mister So-and-So; who in the deuce are you?" No dog so small, and only a few faint-hearts so squalid, that they do not carry a chip on their shoulder. Compare with their progenitors, the wolves in a city park. Here encounters are quick and decisive. The one wolf stands, the other cringes. Rank and character are recognized at once. The pretences of human so............