Then there was an old wife that lived in the cabin,--an old wife made of
sole leather, with yellow-white hair and a thin, pinched face and a body
all angles,--chest, arms, everywhere,--outlined through her straight up
and down calico dress. When she spoke, however, you stopped to listen,--it
was like a wood sound, low and far away,--soft as a bird call. People
living alone in the forests often have these voices.

Last there was a dog,--a mean, sniveling, stump-tailed dog, of no
particular breed or kidney. One of those dogs whose ancestry went to the
bad many generations before he was born. A dog part fox,--he got all his
slyness here; and part wolf, this made him ravenous; and part
bull-terrier, this made him ill-tempered; and all the rest poodle, that
made him too lazy to move.

The wife knew this dog, and hung the bacon on a high nail out of his
reach, and covered with a big dish the pies cooling on the bench; and the
neighbors down the road knew him and chased him out of their dairy-cellars
when he nosed into the milk-pans and cheese-pots; and even the little
children found out what a coward he was, and sent him howling home to his
hole under the porch, where he grumbled and pouted all day like a spoiled
child that had been half whipped. Everybody knew him, and everybody
despised him for a low-down, thieving, lazy cur,--everybody except
Jonathan. Jonathan loved him,--loved his weepy, smeary eyes, and his
rough, black hair, and his fat round body, short stumpy legs, and shorter
stumpy tail,--especially the tail. Everything else that the dog lacked
could be traced back to the peccadillos of his ancestors,--Jonathan was
responsible for the tail.

"Ketched in a b'ar-trap I hed sot up back in thet green timber on Loon
Pond Maountin' six year ago last fall, when he wuz a pup," he would say,
holding the dog in his lap,--his favorite seat. "I swan, ef it warn't too
bad! Thinks I, when I sot it, I'll tell the leetle cuss whar it wuz;
then--I must hev forgot it. It warn't a week afore he wuz runnin' a rabbet
and run right into it. Wall, sir, them iron jaws took thet tail er his'n
off julluk a knife. He's allus been kinder sore ag'in me sence, and I
dunno but he's right, fur it wuz mighty keerless in me. Wall, sir, he come
yowlin' hum, and when he see me he did look saour,--no use talkin',--jest
ez ef he wuz a-sayin', 'Yer think you're paowerful cunnin' with yer
b'ar-traps, don't ye? Jest see what it's done to my tail. It's