ence--here was the talking dog.

It is just this rage for consideration that has betrayed the dog into
his satellite position as the friend of man. The cat, an animal of
franker appetites, preserves his independence. But the dog, with one
eye ever on the audience, has been wheedled into slavery, and praised
and patted into the renunciation of his nature. Once he ceased
hunting[9] and became man's plate-licker, the Rubicon was crossed.
Thenceforth he was a gentleman of leisure; and except the few whom we
keep working, the whole race grew more and more self-conscious,
mannered and affected. The number of things that a small dog does
naturally is strangely small. Enjoying better spirits and not crushed
under material cares, he is far more theatrical than average man. His
whole life, if he be a dog of any pretension to gallantry, is spent in
a vain show, and in the hot pursuit of admiration. Take out your puppy
for a walk, and you will find the little ball of fur clumsy, stupid,
bewildered, but natural. Let but a few months pass, and when you
repeat the process you will find nature buried in convention. He will
do nothing plainly; but the simplest processes of our material life
will all be bent into the forms of an elaborate and mysterious
etiquette. Instinct, says the fool, has awakened. But it is not so.
Some dogs--some, at the very least--if they be kept separate from
others, remain quite natural; and these, when at length they meet with
a companion of experience, and have the game explained to them,
distinguish themselves by the severity of their devotion to its rules.
I wish I were allowed to tell a story which would radiantly illuminate
the point; but men, like dogs, have an elaborate and mysterious
etiquette. It is their bond of sympathy that both are the children of
convention.

The person, man or dog, who has a conscience is eternally condemned to
some degree of humbug; the sense of the law in their members[10]
fatally precipitates either towards a frozen and affected bearing. And
the converse is true; and in the elaborate and conscious manners of
the dog, moral opinions and the love of the ideal stand confessed. To
follow for ten minutes in the street some swaggering, canine cavalier,
is to receive a lesson in dramatic art and the cultured conduct of the
body; in every act and gesture you see him true to a refined
conception; and the dullest cur, beholding him, pricks up his ear and
proceeds to imitate and parod