ple. 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.

[Illustration: WHISKIE]

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. H