Chapter II: Part 2

The Boy was never a regular member of any fire-company, but almost as long as the old Volunteer Fire Department existed, he was what was known as a "Runner." He was attached, in a sort of brevet way, to "Pearl Hose No. 28," and, later, to "11 Hook and Ladder." He knew all the fire districts into which the city was then divided; his ear was always alert, even in the St. John's Park days, for the sound of the alarm-bell, and he ran to every fire at any hour of the day or night, up to ten o'clock P.M. He did not do much when he got to the fire but stand around and "holler." But once--a proud moment--he helped steer the hook-and-ladder truck to a false alarm in Macdougal Street--and once--a very proud moment, indeed--he went into a tenement-house, near Dr. Thompson's church, in Grand Street, and carried two negro babies down-stairs in his arms. There was no earthly reason why the babies should not have been left in their beds; and the colored family did not like it, because the babies caught cold! But The Boy, for once in his life, tasted the delights of self-conscious heroism.

When The Boy, as a bigger boy, was not running to fires he was going to theatres, the greater part of his allowance being spent in the box-offices of Burton's Chambers Street house, of Brougham's Lyceum, corner of Broome Street and Broadway, of Niblo's, and of Castle Garden. There were no afternoon performances in those days, except now and then when the Ravels were at Castle Garden; and the admission to pit and galleries was usually two shillings--otherwise, twenty-five cents. His first play, so far as he remembers, was "The Stranger," a play dismal enough to destroy any taste for the drama, one would suppose, in any juvenile mind. He never cared very much to see "The Stranger" again, but nothing that was a play was too deep or too heavy for him. He never saw the end of any of the more elaborate productions, unless his father took him to the theatre (as once in a while he did), for it was a strict rule of the house, until The Boy was well up in his teens, that he must be in by ten o'clock. His father did not ask him where he was going, or where he had been; but the curfew in Hubert Street tolled at ten. The Boy calculated carefully and exactly how many minutes it took him to run to Hubert Street from Brougham's or from Burton's; and by the middle of the second act his watch--a small silver affair with a hunting-case, in which he could not keep an uncracked crystal--was always in his hand. He never disobeyed his father, and for years he never knew what became of Claude Melnotte after he went to the wars; or if Damon got back in time to save Pythias before the curtain fell. The Boy, naturally, had a most meagre notion as to what all these plays were about, but he enjoyed his fragments of them as he rarely enjoys plays now. Sometimes, in these days, when the air is bad, and plays are worse, and big hats are worse than either, he wishes that he were forced to leave the modern play-house at nine-forty-five, on pain of no supper that night, or twenty lines of "Virgil" the next day.

On very stormy afternoons the boys played theatre in the large garret of The Boy's Hubert Street house; a convenient closet, with a door and a window, serving for the Castle of Elsinore in "Hamlet," for the gunroom of the ship in "Black-eyed Susan," or for the studio of Phidias in "The Marble Heart," as the case might be. "The Brazilian Ape," as requiring more action than words, was a favorite entertainment, only they all wanted to play Jocko the Ape; and they would have made no little success out of the "Lady of Lyons" if any of them had been willing to play Pauline. Their costumes and properties were slight and not always accurate, but they could "launch the curse of Rome," and describe "two hearts beating as one," in a manner rarely equalled on the regular stage. The only thing they really lacked was an audience, neither Lizzie Gustin nor Ann Hughes ever being able to sit through more than one act at a time. When The Boy, as Virginius, with his uncle Aleck's sword-cane, stabbed all the feathers out of the pillow which represented the martyred Virginia; and when Joe Stuart, as Falstaff, broke the bottom out of Ann Hughes's clothes-basket, the license was revoked, and the season came to an untimely end.

Until the beginning of the weekly, or the fortnightly, sailings of the Collins line of steamers from the foot of Canal Street (a spectacle which they never missed in any weather), Joe Stuart, Johnny Robertson, and The Boy played "The Deerslayer" every Saturday in the back-yard of The Boy's house. The area-way was Glimmer-glass, in which they fished, and on which they canoed; the back-stoop was Muskrat Castle; the rabbits were all the wild beasts of the Forest; Johnny was Hawk-Eye, The Boy was Hurry Harry, and Joe Stuart was Chingachgook. Their only food was half-baked potatoes--sweet potatoes if possible--which they cooked themselves and ate ravenously, with butter and salt, if Ann Hughes was amiable, and entirely unseasoned if Ann was disposed to be disobliging.

They talked what they fondly believed was the dialect of the Delaware tribe, and they were constantly on the lookout for the approaches of Rivenoak, or the Panther, who were represented by any member of the family who chanced to stray into the enclosure. They carefully turned their toes in when they walked, making so much effort in this matter that it took a great deal of dancing-school to get their feet back to the "first position" again; and they even painted their faces when they were on the war-path. The rabbits had the worst of it!

The campaign came to a sudden and disastrous conclusion when the hostile tribes, headed by Mrs. Robertson, descended in force upon the devoted band, because Chingachgook broke one of Hawk-Eye's front teeth with an arrow, aimed at the biggest of the rabbits, which was crouching by the side of the roots of the grape-vine, and playing that he was a panther of enormous size.

Johnny Robertson and The Boy had one great superstition--to wit, Cracks! For some now inexplicable reason they thought it unlucky to step on cracks; and they made daily and hourly spectacles of themselves in the streets by the eccentric irregularity of their gait. Now they would take long strides, like a pair of ostriches, and now short, quick steps, like a couple of robins; now they would hop on both feet, like a brace of sparrows; now they would walk on their heels, now on their toes; now with their toes turned in, now with their toes turned out--at right angles, in a splay-footed way; now they would walk with their feet crossed, after the manner of the hands of very fancy, old-fashioned piano-players, skipping from base to treble--over cracks. The whole performance would have driven a sensitive drill-sergeant or ballet-master to distraction. And when they came to a brick sidewalk they would go all around the block to avoid it. They could cross Hudson Street on the cobblestones with great effort, and in great danger of being run over; but they could not possibly travel upon a brick pavement, and avoid the cracks. What would have happened to them if they _did_ step on a crack they did not exactly know. But, for all that, they never stepped on cracks--of their own free will!

The Boy's earliest attempts at versification were found, the other day, in an old desk, and at the end of almost half a century. The copy is in his own boyish, ill-spelled print; and it bears no date. The present owner, his aunt Henrietta, well remembers the circumstances and the occasion, however, having been an active participant in the acts the poem describes, although she avers that she had no hand in its composition. The original, it seems, was transcribed by The Boy upon the cover of a soap-box, which served as a head-stone to one of the graves in his family burying-ground, situated in the back-yard of the Hudson Street house, from which he was taken before he was nine years of age. The monument stood against the fence, and this is the legend it bore--rhyme, rhythm, metre, and orthography being carefully preserved:

"Three little kitens of our old cat
Were berrid this day in this grassplat.
They came to there deth in an old slop pale,
And after loosing their breth
They were pulled out by the tale.
These three little kitens have returned to their maker,
And were put in the grave by The Boy,
Undertaker."

At about this period The Boy officiated at the funeral of another cat, but in a somewhat more exalted capacity. It was the Cranes' cat, at Red Hook--a Maltese lady, who always had yellow kittens. The Boy does not remember the cause of the cat's death, but he thinks that Uncle Andrew Knox ran over her, with the "dyspepsia-wagon"--so called because it had no springs. Anyway, the cat died, and had to be buried. The grave was dug in the garden of the tavern, near the swinging-gate to the stable, and the whole family attended the services. Jane Purdy, in a deep crape veil, was the chief mourner; The Boy's aunts were pall-bearers, in white scarves; The Boy was the clergyman; while the kittens--who did not look at all like their mother--were on hand in a funeral basket, with black shoestrings tied around their necks.

Jane was supposed to be the disconsolate widow. She certainly looked the part to perfection; and it never occurred to any of them that a cat, with kittens, could not possibly have left a widow behind her.

The ceremony was most impressive; the bereaved kittens were loud in their grief; when, suddenly, the village-bell tolled for the death of an old gentleman whom everybody loved, and the comedy became a tragedy. The older children were conscience-stricken at the mummery, and they ran, demoralized and shocked, into the house, leaving The Boy and the kittens behind them. Jane Purdy tripped over her veil, and one of the kittens was stepped on in the crush. But The Boy proceeded with the funeral.

When The Boy got as far as a room of his own, papered with scenes from circus-posters, and peopled by tin soldiers, he used to play that his bed was the barge _Mayflower_, running from Barrytown to the foot of Jay Street, North River, and that he was her captain and crew. She made nightly trips between the two ports; and by day, when she was not tied up to the door-knob--which was Barrytown--she was moored to the handle of the wash-stand drawer--which was the dock at New York. She never was wrecked, and she never ran aground; but great was the excitement of The Boy when, as not infrequently was the case, on occasions of sweeping, Hannah, the up-stairs girl, set her adrift.

The _Mayflower_ was seriously damaged by fire once, owing to the careless use, by a deck-hand, of a piece of punk on the night before the Fourth of July; this same deck-hand being nearly blown up early the very next morning by a bunch of fire-crackers which went off--by themselves--in his lap. He did not know, for a second or two, whether the barge had burst her boiler or had been struck by lightning!

Barrytown is the river port of Red Hook--a charming Dutchess County hamlet in which The Boy spent the first summer of his life, and in which he spent the better part of every succeeding summer for a quarter of a century; and he sometimes goes there yet, although many of the names he knows were carved, in the long-agoes, on the tomb. He always went up and down, in those days, on the _Mayflower_, the real boat of that name, which was hardly more real to him than was the trundle-bed of his vivid, nightly imagination. They sailed from New York at five o'clock P.M., an hour looked for, and longed for, by The Boy, as the very beginning of summer, with all its delightful young charms; and they arrived at their destination about five of the clock the next morning, by which time The Boy was wide awake, and on the lookout for Lasher's Stage, in which he was to travel the intervening three miles. And eagerly he recognized, and loved, every landmark on the road. Barringer's Corner; the half-way tree; the road to the creek and to Madame Knox's; and, at last, the village itself, and the tavern, and the tobacco-factory, and Massoneau's store, over the way; and then, when Jane Purdy had shown him the new kittens and the little chickens, and he had talked to "Fido" and "Fanny," or to Fido alone after Fanny was stolen by gypsies--Fanny was Fido's wife, and a poodle--he rushed off to see Bob Hendricks, who was just his own age, barring a week, and who has been his warm friend for more than half a century; and then what good times The Boy had!

Bob was possessed of a grandfather who could make kites, and swings, and parallel-bars, and things which The Boy liked; and Bob had a mother--and he has her yet, happy Bob!--who made the most wonderful of cookies, perfectly round, with sparkling globules of sugar on them, and little round holes in the middle; and Bob and The Boy for days, and weeks, and months together hen's-egged, and rode in the hay-carts, and went for the mail every noon, and boosted each other up into the best pound-sweet-tree in the neighborhood; and pelted each other with little green apples, which weighed about a pound to the peck; and gathered currants and chestnuts in season; and with long straws they sucked new cider out of bung-holes; and learned to swim; and caught their first fish; and did all the pleasant things that all boys do.

At Red Hook they smoked their first cigar--half a cigar, left by uncle Phil--and they wished they hadn't! And at Red Hook they disobeyed their mothers once, and were found out. They were told not to go wading in the creek upon pain of not going to the creek at all; and for weeks they were deprived of the delights of the society of the Faure boys, through whose domain the creek ran, because, when they went to bed on that disastrous night, it was discovered that Bob had on The Boy's stockings, and that The Boy was wearing Bob's socks; a piece of circumstantial evidence which convicted them both. When the embargo was raised and they next went to the creek, it is remembered that Bob tore his trousers in climbing over a log, and that The Boy fell in altogether.

The Boy usually kept his promises, however, and he was known even to keep a candy-cane--twenty-eight inches long, red and white striped like a barber's pole--for a fortnight, because his mother limited him to the consumption of two inches a day. But he could not keep any knees to his trousers; and when The Boy's mother threatened to sew buttons--brass buttons, with sharp and penetrating eyes--on to that particular portion of the garment in question, he wanted to know, in all innocence, how they expected him to say his prayers!

One of Bob's earliest recollections of The Boy is connected with a toy express-wagon on four wheels, which could almost turn around on its own axis. The Boy imported this vehicle into Red Hook one summer, and they used it for the transportation of their chestnuts and their currants and their apples, green and ripe, and the mail, and most of the dust of the road; and Bob thinks, to this day, that nothing in all these after years has given him so much profound satisfaction and enjoyment as did that little cart.

Bob remembers, too--what The Boy tries to forget--The Boy's daily practice of half an hour on the piano borrowed by The Boy's mother from Mrs. Bates for that dire purpose. Mrs. Bates's piano is almost the only unpleasant thing associated with Red Hook in all The Boy's experience of that happy village. It was pretty hard on The Boy, because, in The Boy's mind, Red Hook should have been a place of unbroken delights. But The Boy's mother wanted to make an all-round man of him, and when his mother said so, of course it had to be done or tried. Bob used to go with The Boy as far as Dr. Bates's house, and then hang about on the gate until The Boy was released; and he asserts that the music which came out of the window in response to The Boy's inharmonic touch had no power whatever to soothe his own savage young breast. He attributes all his later disinclination to music to those dreary thirty minutes of impatient waiting.

The piano and its effect upon The Boy's uncertain temper _may_ have been the innocent cause of the first, and only, approach to a quarrel which The Boy and Bob ever had. The prime cause, however, was, of course, a girl! They were playing, that afternoon, at Cholwell Knox's, when Cholwell said something about Julia Booth which Bob resented, and there was a fight, The Boy taking Cholwell's part; why, he cannot say, unless it was because of his jealousy of Bob's affection and admiration for that charming young teacher, who won all hearts in the village, The Boy's among the number. Anyway, Bob was driven from the field by the hard little green apples of the Knox orchard; more hurt, he declares, by the desertion of his ally than by all the blows he received.

It never happened again, dear Bob, and, please God, it never will!

Another trouble The Boy had in Red Hook was Dr. McNamee, a resident dentist, who operated upon The Boy, now and then. He was a little more gentle than was The Boy's city dentist, Dr. Castle; but he hurt, for all that. Dr. Castle lived in Fourth Street, opposite Washington Parade Ground, and on the same block with Clarke and Fanning's school. And to this day The Boy would go miles out of his way rather than pass Dr. Castle's house. Personally Dr. Castle was a delightful man, who told The Boy amusing stories, which The Boy could not laugh at while his mouth was wide open. But professionally Dr. Castle was to The Boy an awful horror, of whom he always dreamed when his dreams were particularly bad. As he looks back upon his boyhood, with its frequent toothache and its long hours in the dentists' chairs, The Boy sometimes thinks that if he had his life to live over again, and could not go through it without teeth, he would prefer not to be born at all!

It has rather amused The Boy, in his middle age, to learn of the impressions he made upon Red Hook in his extreme youth. Bob, as has been shown, associates him with a little cart, and with a good deal of the concord of sweet sounds. One old friend remembers nothing but his phenomenal capacity for the consumption of chicken pot-pie. Another old friend can recall the scrupulously clean white duck suits which he wore of afternoons, and also the blue-checked long apron which he was forced to wear in the mornings; both of them exceedingly distasteful to The Boy, because the apron was a girl's garment, and because the duck suit meant "dress-up," and only the mildest of genteel play; while Bob's sister dwells chiefly now upon the wonderful valentine The Boy sent once to Zillah Crane. It was so large that it had to have an especial envelope made to fit it; and it was so magnificent, and so delicate, that, notwithstanding the envelope, it came in a box of its own. It had actual lace, and pinkish Cupids reclining on light-blue clouds; and in the centre of all was a compressible bird-cage, which, when it was pulled out, like an accordion, displayed not a dove merely, but a plain gold ring--a real ring, made of real gold. Nothing like it had ever been seen before in all Dutchess County; and it was seen and envied by every girl of Zillah's age between Rhinebeck and Tivoli, between Barrytown and Pine Plains.

The Boy did an extensive business in the valentine line, in the days when February Fourteenth meant much more to boys than it does now. He sent sentimental valentines to Phoebe Hawkins and comic valentines to Ann Hughes, both of them written anonymously, and both directed in a disguised hand. But both recipients always knew from whom they came; and, in all probability, neither of them was much affected by the receipt. The Boy, as he has put on record elsewhere, never really, in his inmost heart, thought that comic valentines were so very comic, because those that came to him usually reflected upon his nose, or were illuminated with portraits of gentlemen of all ages adorned with supernaturally red hair.

In later years, when Bob and The Boy could swim--a little--and had learned to take care of themselves in water over their heads, the mill-pond at Red Hook played an important part in their daily life there. They sailed it, and fished it, and camped out on its banks, with Ed Curtis--before Ed went to West Point--and with Dick Hawley, Josie Briggs, and Frank Rodgers, all first-rate fellows. But that is another story.

The Boy was asked, a year or two ago, to write a paper upon "The Books of his Boyhood." And when he came to think the matter over he discovered, to his surprise, that the Books of his Boyhood consisted of but one book! It was bound in two twelvemo green cloth volumes; it bore the date of 1850, and it was filled with pictorial illustrations of "The Personal History and Experiences of David Copperfield, the Younger." It was the first book The Boy ever read, and he thought then, and sometimes he thinks now, that it was the greatest book ever written. The traditional books of the childhood of other children came later to The Boy: "Robinson Crusoe," and the celebrated "Swiss Family" of the same name; "The Desert Home," of Mayne Reid; Marryat's "Peter Simple"; "The Leather Stocking Tales"; "Rob Roy"; and "The Three Guardsmen" were well thumbed and well liked; but they were not The Boy's first love in fiction, and they never usurped, in his affections, the place of the true account of David Copperfield. It was a queer book to have absorbed the time and attention of a boy of eight or nine, who had to skip the big words, who did not understand it all, but who cried, as he has cried but once since, whenever he came to that dreadful chapter which tells the story of the taking away of David's mother, and of David's utter, hopeless desolation over his loss.

How the book came into The Boy's possession he cannot now remember, nor is he sure that his parents realized how much, or how often, he was engrossed in its contents. It cheered him in the measles, it comforted him in the mumps. He took it to school with him, and he took it to bed with him; and he read it, over and over again, especially the early chapters; for he did not care so much for David after David became Trotwood, and fell in love.

When, in 1852, after his grandfather's death, The Boy first saw London, it was not the London of the Romans, the Saxons, or the Normans, or the London of the Plantagenets or the Tudors, but the London of the Micawbers and the Traddleses, the London of Murdstone and Grinby, the London of Dora's Aunt and of Jip. On his arrival at Euston Station the first object upon which his eyes fell was a donkey-cart, a large wooden tray on wheels, driven, at a rapid pace, by a long-legged young man, and followed, at a pace hardly so rapid, by a boy of about his own age, who seemed in great mental distress. This was the opening scene. And London, from that moment, became to him, and still remains, a great moving panorama of David Copperfield.

He saw the Orfling, that first evening, snorting along Tottenham Court Road; he saw Mealy Potatoes, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, lounging along Broad Street; he saw Martha disappear swiftly and silently into one of the dirty streets leading from Seven Dials; he saw innumerable public-houses--the Lion, or the Lion and something else--in anyone of which David might have consumed that memorable glass of Genuine Stunning ale with a good head on it. As they drove through St. Martin's Lane, and past a court at the back of the church, he even got a glimpse of the exterior of the shop where was sold a special pudding, made of currants, but dear; a two-pennyworth being no larger than a pennyworth of more ordinary pudding at any other establishment in the neighborhood. And, to crown all, when he looked out of his back bedroom window, at Morley's Hotel, he discovered that he was looking at the actual bedroom windows of the Golden Cross on the Strand, in which Steerforth and little Copperfield had that disastrous meeting which indirectly brought so much sorrow to so many innocent men and women.

This was but the beginning of countless similar experiences, and the beginning of a love for Landmarks of a more important but hardly of a more delightful character. Hungerford Market and Hungerford Stairs, with the blacking-warehouse abutting on the water when the tide was in, and on the mud when the tide was out, still stood near Morley's in 1852; and very close to them stood then, and still stands to-day, the old house in Buckingham Street, Adelphi, where, with Mrs. Crupp, Trotwood Copperfield found his lodgings when he began his new life with Spenlow and Jorkins. These chambers, once the home of Clarkson Stanfield, and since of Mr. William Black and of Dr. B. E. Martin, became, in later days, very familiar to The Boy, and still are haunted by the great crowd of the ghosts of the past. The Boy has seen there, within a few years, and with his eyes wide open, the spirits of Traddles, of Micawber, of Steerforth, of Mr. Dick, of Clara Peggotty and Daniel, of Uriah Heep--the last slept one evening on the sofa pillows before the fire, you may remember--and of Aunt Betsy herself. But in 1852 he could only look at the outside of the house, and, now and then, when the door was open, get a glimpse of the stairs down which some one fell and rolled, one evening, when somebody else said it was Copperfield!

The Boy never walked along the streets of London by his father's side during that memorable summer without meeting, in fancy, some friend of David's, without passing some spot that David knew, and loved, or hated. And he recognized St. Paul's Cathedral at the first glance, because it had figured as an illustration on the cover of Peggotty's work-box!

Perhaps the event which gave him the greatest pleasure was a casual meeting with little Miss Moucher in a green omnibus coming from the top of Baker Street to Trafalgar Square. It could not possibly have been anybody else. There were the same large head and face, the same short arms. "Throat she had none; waist she had none; legs she had none, worth mentioning." The Boy can still hear the pattering of the rain on the rattly windows of that lumbering green omnibus; he can remember every detail of the impressive drive; and Miss Moucher, and the fact of her existence in the flesh, and there present, wiped from his mind every trace of Mme. Tussaud's famous gallery, and the waxworks it contained.

This was the Book of The Boy's Boyhood. He does not recommend it as the exclusive literature of their boyhood to other boys; but out of it The Boy knows that he got nothing but what was healthful and helping. It taught him to abominate selfish brutality and sneaking falsehood, as they were exhibited in the Murdstones and the Heeps; it taught him to keep Charles I., and other fads, out of his "Memorials"; it taught him to avoid rash expenditure as it was practised by the Micawbers; it showed him that a man like Steerforth might be the best of good fellows and at the same time the worst and most dangerous of companions; it showed, on the other hand, that true friends like Traddles are worth having and worth keeping; it introduced him to the devoted, sisterly affection of a woman like Agnes; and it proved to him that the rough pea-jacket of a man like Ham Peggotty might cover the simple heart of as honest a gentleman as ever lived.

The Boy, in his time, has been brought in contact with many famous men and women; but upon nothing in his whole experience does he look back now with greater satisfaction than upon his slight intercourse with the first great man he ever knew. Quite a little lad, he was staying at the Pulaski House in Savannah, in 1853--perhaps it was in 1855--when his father told him to observe particularly the old gentleman with the spectacles, who occupied a seat at their table in the public dining-room; for, he said, the time would come when The Boy would be very proud to say that he had breakfasted, and dined, and supped with Mr. Thackeray. He had no idea who, or what, Mr. Thackeray was; but his father considered him a great man, and that was enough for The Boy. He did pay particular attention to Mr. Thackeray, with his eyes and his ears; and one morning Mr. Thackeray paid a little attention to him, of which he is proud, indeed. Mr. Thackeray took The Boy between his knees, and asked his name, and what he intended to be when he grew up. He replied, "A farmer, sir." Why, he cannot imagine, for he never had the slightest inclination towards a farmer's life. And then Mr. Thackeray put his gentle hand upon The Boy's little red head, and said: "Whatever you are, try to be a good one."

To have been blessed by Thackeray is a distinction The Boy would not exchange for any niche in the Temple of Literary Fame; no laurel crown he could ever receive would be able to obliterate, or to equal, the sense of Thackeray's touch; and if there be any virtue in the laying on of hands The Boy can only hope that a little of it has descended upon him.

And whatever The Boy is, he has tried, for Thackeray's sake, "to be a good one!"

FOUR DOGS

WHISKIE

AN EAU DE VIE

In doggerel lines, Whiskie my dog I sing.
These lines are after Virgil, Pope, or some one.
His very voice has got a Whiskie Ring.
I call him Whiskie, 'cause he's such a rum one.

His is a high-whine, and his nip has power,
Hot-Scotch his temper, but no Punch is merrier;
Not Rye, not Schnappish, he's no Whiskie-Sour.
I call him Whiskie--he's a Whis-Skye terrier.

FOUR DOGS

It was Dr. John Brown, of Edinboro', who once spoke in sincere sympathy of the man who "led a dog-less life." It was Mr. "Josh Billings" who said that in the whole history of the world there is but one thing that money cannot buy, to wit: the wag of a dog's tail. And it was Professor John C. Van Dyke who declared the other day, in reviewing the artistic career of Landseer, that he made his dogs too human. It was the Great Creator himself who made dogs too human--so human that sometimes they put humanity to shame.

The Boy has been the friend and confidant of Four Dogs who have helped to humanize him for a quarter of a century and more, and who have souls to be saved, he is sure. And when he crosses the Stygian River he expects to find, on the other shore, a trio of dogs wagging their tails almost off, in their joy at his coming, and with honest tongues hanging out to lick his hands and his feet. And then he is going, with these faithful, devoted dogs at his heels, to talk about dogs with Dr. John Brown, Sir Edwin Landseer, and Mr. "Josh Billings."

The first dog, Whiskie, was an alleged Skye terrier, coming, alas! from a clouded, not a clear, sky. He had the most beautiful and the most perfect head ever seen on a dog, but his legs were altogether too long; and the rest of him, was--just dog. He came into the family in 1867 or 1868. He was, at the beginning, not popular with the seniors; but he was so honest, so ingenuous, so "square," that he made himself irresistible, and he soon became even dearer to the father and to the mother than he was to The Boy. Whiskie was not an amiable character, except to his own people. He hated everybody else, he barked at everybody else, and sometimes he bit everybody else--friends of the household as well as the butcher-boys, the baker-boys, and the borrowers of money who came to the door. He had no discrimination in his likes and dislikes, and, naturally, he was not popular, except among his own people. He hated all cats but his own cat, by whom he was bullied in a most outrageous way. Whiskie had the sense of shame and the sense of humor.

One warm summer evening, the family was sitting on the front steps, after a refreshing shower of rain, when Whiskie saw a cat in the street, picking its dainty way among the little puddles of water. With a muttered curse he dashed after the cat without discovering, until within a few feet of it, that it was the cat who belonged to him. He tried to stop himself in his impetuous career, he put on all his brakes, literally skimming along the street railway-track as if he were out simply for a slide, passing the cat, who gave him a half-contemptuous, half-pitying look; and then, after inspecting the sky to see if the rain was really over and how the wind was, he came back to his place between the father and The Boy as if it were all a matter of course and of every-day occurrence. But he knew they were laughing at him; and if ever a dog felt sheepish, and looked sheepish--if ever a dog said, "What an idiot I've made of myself!" Whiskie was that dog.

The cat was a martinet in her way, and she demanded all the privileges of her sex. Whiskie always gave her precedence, and once when he, for a moment, forgot himself and started to go out of the dining-room door before her, she deliberately slapped him in the face; whereupon he drew back instantly, like the gentleman he was, and waited for her to pass.

Whiskie was fourteen or fifteen years of age in 1882, when the mother went to join the father, and The Boy was taken to Spain by a good aunt and cousins. Whiskie was left at home to keep house with the two old servants who had known him all his life, and were in perfect sympathy with him. He had often been left alone before during the family's frequent journeyings about the world, the entire establishment being kept running purely on his account. Usually he did not mind the solitude; he was well taken care of in their absence, and he felt that they were coming back some day. This time he knew it was different. He would not be consoled. He wandered listlessly and uselessly about the house; into the mother's room, into his master's room; and one morning he was found in a dark closet, where he had never gone before, dead--of a broken heart.

He had only a stump of a tail, but he will wag it--when next his master sees him!

The second dog was Punch--a perfect, thorough-bred Dandie Dinmont, and the most intelligent, if not the most affectionate, of the lot. Punch and The Boy kept house together for a year or two, and alone. The first thing in the morning, the last thing at night, Punch was in evidence. He went to the door to see his master safely off; he was sniffing at the inside of the door the moment the key was heard in the latch, no matter how late at night; and so long as there was light enough he watched for his master out of the window. Punch, too, had a cat--a son, or a grandson, of Whiskie's cat. Punch's favorite seat was in a chair in the front basement. Here, for hours, he would look out at the passers-by--indulging in the study of man, the proper study of his kind. The chair was what is known as "cane-bottomed," and through its perforations the cat was fond of tickling Punch, as he sat. When Punch felt that the joke had been carried far enough, he would rise in his wrath, chase the cat out into the kitchen, around the back-yard, into the kitchen again, and then, perhaps, have it out with the cat under the sink--without the loss of a hair, the use of a claw, or an angry spit or snarl. Punch and the cat slept together, and dined together, in utter harmony; and the master has often gone up to his own bed, after a solitary cigar, and left them purring and snoring in each other's arms. They assisted at each other's toilets, washed each other's faces, and once, when Mary Cook was asked what was the matter with Punch's eye, she said: "I _think_, Sur, that the cat must have put her finger in it, when she combed his bang!"

Punch loved everybody. He seldom barked, he never bit. He cared nothing for clothes, or style, or social position. He was as cordial to a beggar as he would have been to a king; and if thieves had come to break through and steal, Punch, in his unfailing, hospitable amiability, would have escorted them through the house, and shown them where the treasures were kept. All the children were fond of Punch, who accepted mauling as never did dog before. His master could carry him up-stairs by the tail, without a murmur of anything but satisfaction on Punch's part; and one favorite performance of theirs was an amateur representation of "Daniel in the Lion's Den," Punch being all the animals, his master, of course, being the prophet himself. The struggle for victory was something awful. Daniel seemed to be torn limb from limb, Punch, all the time, roaring like a thousand beasts of the forest, and treating his victim as tenderly as if he were wooing a sucking dove. The entertainment--when there were young persons at the house--was of nightly occurrence, and always repeatedly encored. Punch, however, never cared to play Lion to the Daniel of anybody else.

One of Punch's expressions of poetic affection is still preserved by a little girl who is now grown up, and has little girls of her own. It was attached to a Christmas-gift--a locket containing a scrap of blue-gray wool. And here it is:

"Punch Hutton is ready to vow and declare
That his friend Milly Barrett's a brick.
He begs she'll accept of this lock of his hair;
And he sends her his love--and a lick."

Punch's most memorable performance, perhaps, was his appearance at a dinner-party of little ladies and gentlemen. They were told that the chief dish of the entertainment was one which they all particularly liked, and their curiosity, naturally, was greatly excited. The table was cleared, the carving-knife was sharpened in a most demonstrative manner, and half a dozen pairs of very wide-open little eyes were fixed upon the door through which the waitress entered, bearing aloft an enormous platter, upon which nothing was visible but a cover of equally enormous size--both of them borrowed, by-the-way, for the important occasion. When the cover was raised, with all ceremony, Punch was discovered, in a highly nervous state, and apparently as much delighted and amused at the situation as was anybody else. The guests, with one voice, declared that he was "sweet enough to eat."

Punch died very suddenly; poisoned, it is supposed, by somebody whom he never injured. He never injured a living soul! And when Mary Cook dug a hole, by the side of Whiskie's grave, one raw afternoon, and put Punch into it, his master is not ashamed to confess that he shut himself up in his room, threw himself onto the bed, and cried as he has not cried since they took his mother away from him.

Mop was the third of the quartet of dogs, and he came into the household like the Quality of Mercy. A night or two after the death of Punch, his master chanced to be dining with the Coverleys, in Brooklyn. Mr. Coverley, noticing the trappings and the suits of woe which his friend wore in his face, naturally asked the cause. He had in his stable a Dandie as fine as Punch, whom he had not seen, or thought of, for a month. Would the bereaved one like to see him? The mourner would like to look at any dog who looked like the companion who had been taken from him; and a call, through a speaking-tube, brought into the room, head over heels, with all the wild impetuosity of his race, Punch personified, his ghost embodied, his twin brother. The same long, lithe body, the same short legs (the fore legs shaped like a capital S), the same short tail, the same hair dragging the ground, the same beautiful head, the same wistful, expressive eye, the same cool, insinuating nose. The new-comer raced around the table, passing his owner unnoticed, and not a word was spoken. Then this Dandie cut a sort of double pigeon-wing, gave a short bark, put his crooked, dirty little feet on the stranger's knees, insinuated his cool and expressive nose into an unresisting hand, and wagged his stump of a tail with all his loving might. It was the longed-for touch of a vanished paw, the lick of a tongue that was still. He was unkempt, uncombed, uncared for, but he was another Punch, and he knew a friend when he saw one. "If that were my dog he would not live forgotten in a stable: he would take the place in the society to which his birth and his evident breeding entitle him," was the friend's remark, and Mop regretfully went back to his stall.

The next morning, early, he came into the Thirty-fourth Street study, combed, kempt, shining, cared for to a superlative degree; with a note in his mouth signifying that his name was Mop and that he was The Boy's. He was The Boy's, and The Boy was his, so long as he lived, ten happy years for both of them.

Without Punch's phenomenal intelligence, Mop had many of Punch's ways, and all of Punch's trust and affection; and, like Punch, he was never so superlatively happy as when he was roughly mauled and pulled about by his tail. When by chance he was shut out in the back-yard, he knocked, with his tail, on the door; he squirmed his way into the heart of Mary Cook in the first ten minutes, and in half an hour he was on terms of the most affectionate friendship with Punch's cat.

Mop had absolutely no sense of fear or of animal proportions. As a catter he was never equalled; a Yale-man, by virtue of an honorary degree, he tackled everything he ever met in the feline way--with the exception of the Princeton Tiger--and he has been known to attack dogs seven times as big as himself. He learned nothing by experience: he never knew when he was thrashed. The butcher's dog at Onteora whipped, and bit, and chewed him into semi-helpless unconsciousness three times a week for four months, one summer; and yet Mop, half paralyzed, bandaged, soaked in Pond's Extract, unable to hold up his head to respond to the greetings of his own family, speechless for hours, was up and about and ready for another fray and another chewing, the moment the butcher's dog, unseen, unscented by the rest of the household, appeared over the brow of the hill.

The only creature by whom Mop was ever really overcome was a black-and-white, common, every-day, garden skunk. He treed this unexpected visitor on the wood-pile one famous moonlight night in Onteora. And he acknowledged his defeat at once, and like a man. He realized fully his own unsavory condition. He retired to a far corner of the small estate, and for a week, prompted only by his own instinct, he kept to the leeward of Onteora society.

He went out of Onteora, that summer, in a blaze of pugnacious glory. It was the last day of the season; many households were being broken up, and four or five families were leaving the colony together. All was confusion and hurry at the little railway station at Tannersville. Scores of trunks were being checked, scores of packages were being labelled for expressage, every hand held a bag, or a bundle, or both; and Mop, a semi-invalid, his fore paw and his ear in slings, the result of recent encounters with the butcher's dog, was carried, for safety's sake, and for the sake of his own comfort, in a basket, which served as an ambulance, and was carefully placed in the lap of the cook. As the train finally started, already ten minutes late, the cook, to give her hero a last look at the Hill-of-the-Sky, opened the basket, and the window, that he might wag a farewell tail. When lo! the butcher's dog appeared upon the scene, and, in an instant, Mop was out of the window and under the car-wheels, in the grip of the butcher's dog. Intense was the excitement. The engine was stopped, and brakemen, and firemen, and conductors, and passengers, and on-lookers, and other dogs, were shouting and barking and trying to separate the combatants. At the end of a second ten minutes Mop--minus a piece of the other ear--was back in his ambulance: conquered, but happy. He never saw the butcher's dog or Onteora again.

To go back a little. Mop was the first person who was told of his master's engagement, and he was the first to greet the wife when she came home, a bride, to his own house. He had been made to understand, from the beginning, that she did not care for dogs--in general. And he set himself out to please, and to overcome the unspoken antagonism. He had a delicate part to play, and he played it with a delicacy and a tact which rarely have been equalled. He did not assert himself; he kept himself in the background; he said little; his approaches at first were slight and almost imperceptible, but he was always ready to do, or to help, in an unaggressive way. He followed her about the house, up-stairs and down-stairs, and he looked and waited. Then he began to sit on the train of her gown; to stand as close to her as was fit and proper; once in a while to jump upon the sofa beside her, or into the easy-chair behind her, winking at his master, from time to time, in his quiet way.

And at last he was successful. One dreary winter, when he suffered terribly from inflammatory rheumatism, he found his mistress making a bed for him by the kitchen fire, getting up in the middle of the night to go down to look after him, when he uttered, in pain, the cries he could not help. And when a bottle of very rare old brandy, kept for some extraordinary occasion of festivity, was missing, the master was informed that it had been used in rubbing Mop!

Mop's early personal history was never known. Told once that he was the purest Dandie in America, and asked his pedigree, his master was moved to look into the matter of his family tree. It seems that a certain sea-captain was commissioned to bring back to this country the best Dandie to be had in all Scotland. He sent his quartermaster to find him, and the quartermaster found Mop under a private carriage, in Argyle Street, Glasgow, and brought him on board. That is Mop's pedigree.

Mop died of old age and of a complication of diseases, in the spring of 1892. He lost his hair, he lost his teeth, he lost everything but his indomitable spirit; and when almost on the brink of the grave, he stood in the back-yard--literally, on the brink of his own grave--for eight hours in a March snow-storm, motionless, and watching a great black cat on the fence, whom he hypnotized, and who finally came down to be killed. The cat weighed more than Mop did, and was very gamy. And the encounter nearly cost a lawsuit.

This was Mop's last public appearance. He retired to his bed before the kitchen range, and gradually and slowly he faded away: amiable, unrepining, devoted to the end. A consultation of doctors showed that his case was hopeless, and Mop was condemned to be carried off to be killed humanely by the society founded by Mr. Bergh, where without cruelty they end the sufferings of animals. Mop had not left his couch for weeks. His master spoke to him about it, with tears in his eyes, one night. He said: "To-morrow must end it, old friend. 'Tis for your sake and your relief. It almost breaks my heart, old friend. But there is another and a better world--even for dogs, old friend. And for old acquaintance' sake, and for old friendship's sake, I must have you sent on ahead of me, old friend."

The next morning, when he came down to breakfast, there by the empty chair sat Mop. How he got himself up the stairs nobody knows. But there he was, and the society which a good man founded saw not Mop that day.

The end came soon afterwards. And Mop has gone on to join Whiskie and Punch in their waiting for The Boy.

The family went abroad for a year's stay, when Mop died, and they rented the house to good people and good tenants, who have never been forgiven for one particular act. They buried a dog of their own in the family plot in the back-yard, and under the ailantus-tree which shades the graves of the cats and the dogs; and The Boy feels that they have profaned the spot!

It seemed to his master, after the passing of Mop, that the master's earthly account with dogs was closed. The pain of parting was too great to be endured. But another Dandie came to him, one Christmas morning, to fill the aching void; and for a time again his life is not a dogless one.

The present ruler of the household has a pedigree much longer and much straighter than his own front legs. Although he comes from a distinguished line of prize-winning thoroughbreds, he never will be permitted to compete for a medal on his own behalf. The Dog Show should be suppressed by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Dogs. It has ruined the dispositions and broken the hearts of very many of the best friends humanity ever had. And the man who would send his dog to the Dog Show, would send his wife to a Wife Show, and permit his baby to be exhibited, in public, for a blue ribbon or a certificate--at an admission-fee of fifty cents a head!

Mop's successor answers to the name of Roy--when he answers to anything at all. He is young, very wilful, and a little hard of hearing, of which latter affliction he makes the most. He always understands when he is invited to go out. He is stone-deaf, invariably, when he is told to come back. But he is full of affection, and he has a keen sense of humor. In the face he looks like Thomas Carlyle, and Professor John Weir declares that his body is all out of drawing!

At times his devotion to his mistress is beautiful and touching. It is another case of "Mary and the Lamb, you know." If his mistress is not visible, he waits patiently about; and he is sure to go wherever she goes. It makes the children of the neighborhood laugh and play. But it is severe upon the master, who does most of the training, while the mistress gets most of the devotion. That is the way with lambs, and with dogs, and with some folks!