content with his acquired respectability, and with no care but to

support it solemnly. Are we to condemn or praise this self-made
dog? We praise his human brother. And thus to conquer vicious

habits is as rare with dogs as with men. With the more part, for
all their scruple-mongering and moral thought, the vices that are

born with them remain invincible throughout; and they live all
their years, glorying in their virtues, but still the slaves of

their defects. Thus the sage Coolin was a thief to the last; among
a thousand peccadilloes, a whole goose and a whole cold leg of

mutton lay upon his conscience; but Woggs, (7) whose soul's
shipwreck in the matter of gallantry I have recounted above, has

only twice been known to steal, and has often nobly conquered the
temptation. The eighth is his favourite commandment. There is

something painfully" target="_blank" title="ad.痛苦地；费力地">painfully human in these unequal virtues and mortal
frailties of the best. Still more painful is the bearing of those

"stammering professors" in the house of sickness and under the
terror of death. It is beyond a doubt to me that, somehow or

other, the dog connects together, or confounds, the uneasiness of
sickness and the consciousness of guilt. To the pains of the body

he often adds the tortures of the conscience; and at these times
his haggard protestations form, in regard to the human deathbed, a

dreadful parody or parallel.
I once supposed that I had found an inverse relation between the

double etiquette which dogs obey; and that those who were most
addicted to the showy street life among other dogs were less

careful in the practice of home virtues for the tyrant man. But
the female dog, that mass of carneying affectations, shines equally

in either sphere; rules her rough posse of attendant swains with
unwearying tact and gusto; and with her master and mistress pushes

the arts of insinuation to their crowning point. The attention of
man and the regard of other dogs flatter (it would thus appear) the

same sensibility; but perhaps, if we could read the canine heart,
they would be found to flatter it in very different degrees. Dogs

live with man as courtiers round a monarch, steeped in the flattery
of his notice and enriched with sinecures. To push their favour in

this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of
their lives; and their joys may lie outside. I am in despair at

our persistentignorance. I read in the lives of our companions
the same processes of reason, the same antique and fatal conflicts

of the right against the wrong, and of unbitted nature with too
rigid custom; I see them with our weaknesses, vain, false,

inconstant against appetite, and with our one stalk of virtue,
devoted to the dream of an ideal; and yet, as they hurry by me on

the street with tail in air, or come singly to solicit my regard, I
must own the secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable to

man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have they
indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments snatched from

courtiership when they touch noses with the tinker's mongrel, the
brief reward and pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless,

when man shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the
pleasures of an art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the

affection warms and strengthens till it fills the soul. But
doubtless, also, the masters are, in many cases, the object of a

merely interested cultus, sitting aloft like Louis Quatorze, giving
and receiving flattery and favour; and the dogs, like the majority

of men, have but foregone their true existence and become the dupes
of their ambition.

CHAPTER XIII. A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED
THESE words will be familiar to all students of Skelt's Juvenile

Drama. That national monument, after having changed its name to
Park's, to Webb's, to Redington's, and last of all to Pollock's,

has now become, for the most part, a memory. Some of its pillars,
like Stonehenge, are still afoot, the rest clean vanished. It may

be the Museum numbers a full set; and Mr. Ionides perhaps, or else
her gracious Majesty, may boast their great collections; but to the

plain private person they are become, like Raphaels, unattainable.
I have, at different times, possessed ALADDIN, THE RED ROVER, THE

BLIND BOY, THE OLD OAK CHEST, THE WOOD DAEMON, JACK SHEPPARD, THE
MILLER AND HIS MEN, DER FREISCHUTZ, THE SMUGGLER, THE FOREST OF

BONDY, ROBIN HOOD, THE WATERMAN, RICHARD I., MY POLL AND MY PARTNER
JOE, THE INCHCAPE BELL (imperfect), and THREE-FINGERED JACK, THE

TERROR OF JAMAICA; and I have assisted others in the illumination
of MAID OF THE INN and THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO. In this roll-call

of stirring names you read the evidences of a happy childhood; and
though not half of them are still to be procured of any living

stationer, in the mind of their once happy owner all survive,
kaleidoscopes of changing pictures, echoes of the past.

There stands, I fancy, to this day (but now how fallen!) a certain
stationer's shop at a corner of the wide thoroughfare that joins

the city of my childhood with the sea. When, upon any Saturday, we
made a party to behold the ships, we passed that corner; and since

in those days I loved a ship as a man loves Burgundy or daybreak,
this of itself had been enough to hallow it. But there was more

than that. In the Leith Walk window, all the year round, there
stood displayed a theatre in working order, with a "forest set," a

"combat," and a few "robbers carousing" in the slides; and below
and about, dearer tenfold to me! the plays themselves, those

budgets of romance, lay tumbled one upon another. Long and often
have I lingered there with empty pockets. One figure, we shall

say, was visible in the first plate of characters, bearded, pistol
in hand, or drawing to his ear the clothyard arrow; I would spell

the name: was it Macaire, or Long Tom Coffin, or Grindoff, 2d
dress? O, how I would long to see the rest! how - if the name by

chance were hidden - I would wonder in what play he figured, and
what immortal legend justified his attitude and strange apparel!

And then to go within, to announce yourself as an intending
purchaser, and, closely watched, be suffered to undo those bundles

and breathlesslydevour those pages of gesticulating villains,
epileptic combats, bosky forests, palaces and war-ships, frowning

fortresses and prison vaults - it was a giddy joy. That shop,
which was dark and smelt of Bibles, was a loadstone rock for all

that bore the name of boy. They could not pass it by, nor, having
entered, leave it. It was a place besieged; the shopmen, like the

Jews rebuilding Salem, had a double task. They kept us at the
stick's end, frowned us down, snatched each play out of our hand

ere we were trusted with another, and, increditable as it may
sound, used to demand of us upon our entrance, like banditti, if we

came with money or with empty hand. Old Mr. Smith himself, worn
out with my eternal vacillation, once swept the treasures from

before me, with the cry: "I do not believe, child, that you are an
intending purchaser at all!" These were the dragons of the garden;

but for such joys of paradise we could have faced the Terror of
Jamaica himself. Every sheet we fingered was another lightning

glance into obscure, delicious story; it was like wallowing in the
raw stuff of story-books. I know nothing to compare with it save

now and then in dreams, when I am privileged to read in certain
unwrit stories of adventure, from which I awake to find the world

all vanity. The CRUX of Buridan's donkey was as nothing to the
uncertainty of the boy as he handled and lingered and doated on

these bundles of delight; there was a physical pleasure in the
sight and touch of them which he would jealously prolong; and when

at length the deed was done, the play selected, and the impatient
shopman had brushed the rest into the gray portfolio, and the boy

was forth again, a little late for dinner, the lamps springing into
light in the blue winter's even, and THE MILLER, or THE ROVER, or

some kindred drama clutched against his side - on what gay feet he
ran, and how he laughed aloud in exultation! I can hear that

laughter still. Out of all the years of my life, I can recall but
one home-coming to compare with these, and that was on the night

when I brought back with me the ARABIAN ENTERTAINMENTS in the fat,
old, double-columned volume with the prints. I was just well into

the story of the Hunchback, I remember, when my clergyman-
grandfather (a man we counted pretty stiff) came in behind me. I

grew blind with terror. But instead of ordering the book away, he
said he envied me. Ah, well he might!

The purchase and the first half-hour at home, that was the summit.
Thenceforth the interest declined by little and little. The fable,