ox eating a duck in the glass
case in the hall that he is so fond of, and even the council he wanted
to have, seemed to matter much less than old Pincher.

"I want you all to let's go out and look for him," said Alice, carrying
out the meaning of the faces she had made and beginning to howl. "Oh,
Pincher, suppose something happens to him; you might get my hat and
coat, Dora. Oh, oh, oh!"

We all got our coats and hats, and by the time we were ready Alice had
conquered it to only sniffing, or else, as Oswald told her kindly, she
wouldn't have been allowed to come.

"Let's go on the Heath," Noel said. "The dear departed dog used to like
digging there."

So we went. And we said to every single person we met--

"Please have you seen a thorough-bred fox-terrier dog with a black patch
over one eye, and another over his tail, and a tan patch on his right
shoulder?" And every one said, "No, they hadn't," only some had more
polite ways of saying it than others. But after a bit we met a
policeman, and he said, "I see one when I was on duty last night, like
what you describe, but it was at the end of a string. There was a young
lad at the other end. The dog didn't seem to go exactly willing."

He also told us the lad and the dog had gone over Greenwich way. So we
went down, not quite so wretched in our insides, because now it seemed
that there was some chance, though we wondered the policeman _could_
have let Pincher go when he saw he didn't want to, but he said it wasn't
his business. And now we asked every one if they'd seen a lad and a
thoroughbred fox-terrier with a black patch, and cetera.

And one or two people said they had, and we thought it must be the same
the policeman had seen, because they said, too, that the dog didn't seem
to care about going where he was going.

So we went on and through the Park and past the Naval College, and we
didn't even stop to look at that life-sized firm ship in the playground
that the Naval Collegians have to learn about ropes and spars on, and
Oswald would willingly give a year of his young life to have that ship
for his very own.

And we didn't go into the Painted Hall either, because our fond hearts
were with Pincher, and we could not really have enjoyed looking at
Nelson's remains, of the shipwrecks where the drowning people all look
so dry, or even the pictures where young heroes are boarding pirates
from Spain, just as Oswald would do if he had half a chance, with the
pira