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 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 parody that charming ease. For to be a high-mannered and high-minded
gentleman, careless, affable, and gay, is the inborn pretension of the
dog. The large dog, so much lazier, so much more weighed upon with
matter, so majestic in repose, so beautiful in effort, is born with the
dramatic means to wholly represent the part. And it is more pathetic and
perhaps more instructive to consider the small dog in his conscientious
and imperfect efforts to outdo Sir Philip Sidney. For the ideal of the
dog is feudal and religious; the ever-present polytheism, the
whip-bearing Olympus of mankind, rules them on the one hand; on the
other, their singular difference of size and strength among themselves
effectually prevents the appearance of the democratic notion. Or we
might more exactly compare their society to the curious spectacle
presented by a school--ushers, monitors, and big and little
boys--qualified by one circumstance, the introduction of the other sex.
In each we should ob