landing of a
three or four pound barbel.

No one would have suspected that under his calm, abstracted,
philosophical look, this dog, so serious that he was almost melancholy,
and despised all frivolity, nursed an overmastering, strange, never to
be suspected passion, absolutely contrary to his apparent moral and
physical character.

"You do not mean," I hear my reader exclaim, "that the good Zamore had
hidden vices?--that he was a thief?" No. "A libertine?" No. "That he
loved brandied cherries?" No. "That he bit people?" Never. Zamore was
crazy about dancing. He was an artist devoted to the choregraphic art.

He became conscious of his vocation in the following manner. One day
there appeared on the square at Passy a gray moke, with sores on its
back, and drooping ears, one of those wretched mountebanks' asses that
Decamps and Fouquet used to paint so well. The two baskets balanced on
either side of his raw and prominent backbone contained a troupe of
trained dogs, dressed as marquesses, troubadours, Turks, Alpine
shepherdesses, or Queens of Golconda, according to their sex. The
impresario put down the dogs, cracked his whip, and suddenly every one
of the actors forsook the horizontal for the perpendicular position, and
transformed itself into a biped. The drum and fife started up and the
ballet commenced.

Zamore, who was gravely idling around, stopped smitten with wonder at
the sight. The dogs, dressed in showy colours, braided with imitation
gold lace on every seam, a plumed hat or a turban on their heads, and
moving in cadence to a witching rhythm, with a distant resemblance to
human beings, appeared to him to be supernatural creatures. The
skilfully linked steps, the slides, the pirouettes delighted but did not
discourage him. Like Correggio at the sight of Raphael's painting, he
exclaimed in his canine speech, _Anch' io son pittore!_ and when the
company filed past him, he also, filled with a noble spirit of
emulation, rose up, somewhat uncertainly, upon his hind legs and
attempted to join them, to the great delight of the onlookers.

The manager did not see it in that light, and let fly a smart cut of his
whip at Zamore, who was driven from the circle, just as a spectator
would be ejected from the theatre did he, during the performance, take
on himself to ascend to the stage and to take part in the ballet.

This public humiliation did not check Zamore's vocation. He returned
home with drooping tail and thou