ubber plant and husband.

By Sirius! there was a biped I felt sorry for. He was a little man with
sandy hair and whiskers a good deal like mine. Henpecked?--well, toucans
and flamingoes and pelicans all had their bills in him. He wiped the
dishes and listened to my mistress tell about the cheap, ragged things
the lady with the squirrel-skin coat on the second floor hung out on her
line to dry. And every evening while she was getting supper she made him
take me out on the end of a string for a walk.

If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone they'd never
marry. Laura Lean Jibbey, peanut brittle, a little almond cream on the
neck muscles, dishes unwashed, half an hour's talk with the iceman,
reading a package of old letters, a couple of pickles and two bottles of
malt extract, one hour peeking through a hole in the window shade into
the flat across the air-shaft--that's about all there is to it. Twenty
minutes before time for him to come home from work she straightens up
the house, fixes her rat so it won't show, and gets out a lot of sewing
for a ten-minute bluff.

I led a dog's life in that flat. 'Most all day I lay there in my corner
watching that fat woman kill time. I slept sometimes and had pipe dreams
about being out chasing cats into basements and growling at old ladies
with black mittens, as a dog was intended to do. Then she would pounce
upon me with a lot of that drivelling poodle palaver and kiss me on the
nose--but what could I do? A dog can't chew cloves.

I began to feel sorry for Hubby, dog my cats if I didn't. We looked so
much alike that people noticed it when we went out; so we shook the
streets that Morgan's cab drives down, and took to climbing the piles
of last December's snow on the streets where cheap people live.

One evening when we were thus promenading, and I was trying to look like
a prize St. Bernard, and the old man was trying to look like he wouldn't
have murdered the first organ-grinder he heard play Mendelssohn's
wedding-march, I looked up at him and said, in my way:

"What are you looking so sour about, you oakum trimmed lobster? She
don't kiss you. You don't have to sit on her lap and listen to talk
that would make the book of a musical comedy sound like the maxims of
Epictetus. You ought to be thankful you're not a dog. Brace up,
Benedick, and bid the blues begone."

The matrimonial mishap looked down at me with almost canine intelligence
in his face.

"Why, dogg