atriotic friends the matter is more
simple; their generosity in concession fills me with admiration and
their forbearance in exaction challenges my astonishment as one of the
seven wonders of American hospitality. In fancy I see the ceremony of
their "presentation" and as examples of simple republican dignity I
commend their posture to the youth of this fair New World, inviting
particular attention to the grand, bold curves of character shown in the
outlines of the Human Ham.

A DISSERTATION ON DOGS

OF ALL anachronisms and survivals, the love of the dog; is the most
reasonless. Because, some thousands of years ago, when we wore other
skins than our own and sat enthroned upon our haunches, tearing
tangles of tendons from raw bones with our teeth, the dog ministered
purveyorwise to our savage needs, we go on cherishing him to this day,
when his only function is to lie sun-soaken on a door mat and insult
us as we pass in and out, enamored of his fat superfluity. One dog in
a thousand earns his bread--and takes beefsteak; the other nine hundred
and ninety-nine we maintain, by cheating the poor, in the style suitable
to their state.

The trouble with the modern dog is that he is the same old dog. Not an
inch has the rascal advanced along the line of evolution. We have ceased
to squat upon our naked haunches and gnaw raw bones, but this companion
of the childhood of the race, this vestigial remnant of _juventus mundi_
this dismal anachronism, this veteran inharmony of the scheme of
things, the dog, has abated no jot nor tittle of his unthinkable
objection-ableness since the morning stars sang together and he had sat
up all night to deflate a lung at the performance. Possibly he may some
time be improved otherwise than by effacement, but at present he is
still in that early stage of reform that is not incompatible with a
mouthful of reformer.

The dog is a detestable quadruped. He knows more ways to be
unmentionable than can be suppressed in seven languages.

The word "dog" is a term of contempt the world over. Poets have sung and
prosaists have prosed of the virtues of individual dogs, but nobody
has had the hardihood to eulogize the species. No man loves the Dog; he
loves his own dog or dogs, and there he stops; the force of perverted
affection can no further go. He loves his own dog partly because that
thrifty creature, ever cadging when not maurauding, tickles his vanity
by fawning upon him as the visible sour