bearing of his deity, my father. It
was no sinecure to be Coolin's idol; he was exacting like a rigid
parent; and at every sign of levity in the man whom he respected, he
announced loudly the death of virtue and the proximate fall of the
pillars of the earth.

I have called him a snob; but all dogs are so, though in varying
degrees. It is hard to follow their snobbery among themselves; for
though I think we can perceive distinctions of rank, we cannot grasp
what is the criterion. Thus in Edinburgh, in a good part of the town,
there were several distinct societies or clubs that met in the morning
to--the phrase is technical--to "rake the backets"[21] in a troop. A
friend of mine, the master of three dogs, was one day surprised to
observe that they had left one club and joined another; but whether it
was a rise or a fall, and the result of an invitation or an expulsion,
was more than he could guess. And this illustrates pointedly our
ignorance of the real life of dogs, their social ambitions and their
social hierarchies. At least, in their dealings with men they are not
only conscious of sex, but of the difference of station. And that in
the most snobbish manner; for the poor man's dog is not offended by
the notice of the rich, and keeps all his ugly feeling for those
poorer or more ragged than his master. And again, for every station
they have an ideal of behaviour, to which the master, under pain of
derogation, will do wisely to conform. How often has not a cold glance
of an eye informed me that my dog was disappointed; and how much more
gladly would he not have taken a beating than to be thus wounded in
the seat of piety!

I knew one disrespectable dog. He was far liker a cat; cared little or
nothing for men, with whom he merely coexisted as we do with cattle,
and was entirely devoted to the art of poaching. A house would not
hold him, and to live in a town was what he refused. He led, I
believe, a life of troubled but genuine pleasure, and perished beyond
all question in a trap. But this was an exception, a marked reversion
to the ancestral type; like the hairy human infant. The true dog of
the nineteenth century, to judge by the remainder of my fairly large
acquaintance, is in love with respectability. A street-dog was once
adopted by a lady. While still an Arab, he had done as Arabs do,
gambolling in the mud, charging into butchers' stalls, a cat-hunter, a
sturdy beggar, a common rogue and vagabond; but with his