aving caught at least one
quality of my subject and of following up this scent at a wearisome
length. And yet I have not begun to exhaust my theme, and have hardly
given a glimpse of its many lights and shades. Inasmuch as there is an
excessive tendency just now to show the lights only, it may have been
noticed that I have rather emphasized the shades. Perhaps I shall not
have written in vain if I have succeeded in moderating the present
_kynomania_, surpassing in virulence even the aesthetic craze. The dog is
having his day now,--that is clear. I presume it is the order of nature,
and that we must expect a season in human history when the dog-star will
rage. But it may not be unseasonable to recommend a slight muzzle to the
dog-bitten, especially of the literary _gens_.

F. N. ZABRISKIE.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] By a recent decision of the Supreme Court of Maine, the judges
standing six to one, it was decided that dogs are not to be classed with
domestic animals. The learned Court affirms "that they retain in great
measure their vicious habits, furnish no support to the family, add
nothing in a legal sense to the wealth of the community, and are not
inventoried as property of a debtor or dead man's estate, or as liable
to taxation except under a special provision of the statute; that when
kept it is for pleasure, or, if any usefulness is obtained from them, it
is founded upon the ferocity natural to them, by which they are made to
serve as a watch or for hunting; and that while because of his
attachment to his master, from which arises a well-founded expectation
of his return when lost, the law gives the owner the right of
reclamation, the owner in all other respects has only that qualified
property in them which he may have in wild animals generally."

RENA'S WARNING.

"If anything be anything," said Frederick Brent, "the Pennsylvania
mountains are what Oscar Wilde called them."

"Oh, you miserable agnostic!" exclaimed his friend Professor
Helfenstein. "Can you not, in the face of this so beautiful landscape,
get rid of your eternal subjunctive mood? _If_, indeed!"

The two men had stopped at a high point on the road they had been
traversing, and were looking across a fair and fertile valley, flooded
by the summer-morning sunlight, to the mountains on its western rim.

A slight smile showed Brent's pleasure in arousing his companion's
indignation.

"Well," said he, "my ideas of natural beauty and those