imals and could tell a
hundred traits of the ingenuity, reasoning, and philosophical powers of
cats, dogs, and birds, I am bound to confess that animals wholly lack
any feeling for art. Never have I seen a single one notice a picture,
and the story of the birds that picked at the grapes in the painting by
Zeuxis, strikes me as a piece of invention. It is precisely the feeling
for ornament and art that distinguishes man from brutes. Dogs never look
at pictures and never put on earrings. Well, Myrza, at the sight of the
portrait placed against the wall by Bonnegrace, sprang from the stool on
which she was lying curled up, dashed at the canvas and barked furiously
at it, trying to bite the stranger who had made his way into the room.
Great was her surprise when she found herself compelled to recognise
that she had a plane surface before her, that her teeth could not lay
hold of it, and that it was no more than a vain presentment. She smelled
the picture, tried to wedge in behind the frame, looked at us both with
a glance of questioning and wonder, and returned to her place, where she
disdainfully went to sleep again, refusing to have anything more to do
with the painted individual. Myrza's features will not be lost to
posterity, for there is a fine portrait of her by the Hungarian artist,
Victor Madarasz.

Let me close with the story of Dash. One day a dealer in broken bottles
and glass stopped at my door in quest of such wares. He had in his cart
a puppy, three or four months old, which he had been commissioned to
drown, whereat the worthy fellow grieved much, for the dog kept looking
at him with a tender and beseeching look as if he knew well what was
going to happen. The reason of the severe sentence passed on the puppy
was that he had broken his fore paw. My heart was filled with pity for
him, and I took charge of the condemned creature; called in a vet, and
had Dash's paw set in splints and bandaged. It was impossible, however,
to stop him gnawing at the dressings; the paw could not be cured, and
the bones not having knitted, it hung limp like the sleeve of a man who
has lost an arm. His infirmity, however, did not prevent his being
jolly, lively, and full of fun, and he managed to race along quite fast
on his three legs.

He was an out and out street dog, a rascally little cur that Buffon
himself would have been puzzled to classify. He was ugly, but his
features were uncommonly mobile and sparkled with cleverness. H