t
chiding" rings through Elizabethan literature. The boy Will Shakespeare
must often have hearkened to the hounds, "match'd in mouth like bells,"
coursing the Cotswolds, Silver and Belman and Sweetlips and Echo, their
heads hung "with ears that sweep away the morning dew," the "speed of
the cry" outrunning his "sense of hearing."

Sigurd was but mildly interested when we told him that in George
Eliot's novels there were over fifty dogs, ranging all the way from pug
to mastiff, nor did he care greatly for Dickens' dogs, not even
blundering, ill-favored, clumsy, "bullet-headed" Diogenes, Florence
Dombey's comforter, nor the bandy leader of Jerry's dancing troupe,
who, because of a lost half-penny, had to grind out Old Hundred on the
barrel-organ while his companions devoured their supper--and his; but
Scott's dogs, from fleet Lufra of _The Lady of the Lake_ to the Dandy
Dinmonts of _Guy Mannering_,--"There's auld Pepper and auld Mustard,
and young Pepper and young Mustard, and little Pepper and little
Mustard"--made him blink and prick up his ears. Thus encouraged, I
would tell him of Sir Walter's love for all his home dogs and most of
all for the tall stag-hound Maida; how Herrick wept for his spaniel
Tracy; how Southey grieved when his "poor old friend" Phillis, another
spaniel, was drowned; how Landor delighted in dogs from the boyhood
when he boxed with Captain behind the coach house door to the extreme
old age whose loneliness was solaced by two silky-coated Pomeranians,
first, in Bath, by the golden Pomero, who would bark an ecstatic
accompaniment to his master's tremendous explosions of laughter, and
then, in Florence, by Giallo, whose opinions on politics and letters
the snowy-bearded poet would quote with humorous respect; how Nero, a
Maltese fringy-paws, brightened the somber home of the Carlyles; and
how Pope's favorite dog was, as he bitterly suggests, not unlike
himself in being "a little one, a lean one, and none of the finest
shaped." If Sigurd seemed responsive, I might go on with accounts of
Mrs. Browning's Flush; of Hogg's Hector, "auld, towzy, trusty friend";
of Arnold's dachshunds, Geist, Max and Kaiser; of Gilder's Leo,

"Leo the shaggy, the lustrous, the giant, the gentle Newfoundland,"

of Lehman's "flop-eared" Rufus, and of Miss Letts' terrier Tim in his
"wheaten-colored coat."

Lest Sigurd should get the impression that the globe was populated
chiefly by poets, Joy-of-Life would strike in