I DARE not say that the bull-terrier, my hero, was pure bred. I am strongly disposed to think that he was mongrel—of the hardy, self-reliant, incorrigible type which some mongrel races assume, until their very mongrelness, like their ugliness, becomes almost respectable by its manly independence and stoical indifference.

He was not by any means a dog of fine feelings, though no doubt he had his weak side, which had nothing to do with the question of his personal appearance. He was a democrat to the backbone, with so little pretension to be what he was not, that if it had not been for a large stock of coarse stolidity, and of self-confidence amounting to impudence, a total incapacity to comprehend a higher range of character than he himself possessed, and a certain scurrilous tongue of his own, he would have been, in his unvarnished low life, still tolerably free from vulgarity.

If you will examine him narrowly, you will find clear indications of the qualities I have referred to in his general aspect. I do not say anything of the shortness of his ears, as I suspect they have been cropped, and he is certainly not accountable for an operation performed against his will. But remark and admire his small piggish eyes, the broad brevity of his nose, and the equal brevity of his tail, the width of his jowl, the thickness of his neck—even in his clumsy conformation, and the peculiar dogmatic obstinacy with which his substantial paws are turned inwards. I am afraid I cannot call him anything except a plain-looking dog, with no nonsense about him.

But he is not destitute of solid advantages, on which he justly piques himself, in that big body scarred with the traces of many a combat in which he has come off the victor.

He may be little to boast of where speed, agility, keenness of scent, quickness and sureness of sight, discipline, docility, and splendid sagacity are desired, but he has always his vigour and endurance to fall back upon, and they are a tower of strength in themselves.

That bullet-head and those close-shut jaws can thrust like a battering-ram and grip like a vice. His capacious chest and hind quarters, and his posts of legs, offer a great field of resistance, and are as hard to uproot as a stout young sapling. His hide is well-nigh as thick as that of a rhinoceros, and can stand a perfect hail-storm of blows without flinching. Many a rival dog he has throttled, many a man and boy he has threatened successfully to “pin.” His scowl and his growl are enough to repel all, save the boldest and most dauntless of assailants.

If he is not a dog of brilliant parts, he knows a thing or two where self-preservation is concerned. He is perfectly capable of looking after number one—the only number which he feels himself called upon to reckon; in fact, poor fellow, he has been accustomed to that reckoning, and to dwelling upon it with dull, degrading reiteration from his earliest years.

If you could ask himself, he would tell you decidedly that he has no relations, and he would imply with an inarticulate murmur, between a grunt and a growl, that the question is one of perfect indifference to him; he does not mind the privation in the least—he is sufficient for himself.

For that matter, ancestors, contemporaries, descendants would have been a considerable incumbrance to him in his circumstances, which he will not hesitate to admit have been for the most part precarious, and in what has usually been his hand-to-mouth mode of picking up a living.

Not that he is a dog of no calling, or that he merely works on the job principle. You may notice that he has a collar round his neck, and is therefore of sufficient consequence to own a master. Indeed, he has nothing of the shirking, hang-dog air, alternating with the savage expression of the dog-tramp or pauper. His very heavy assurance and thorough mastery of the situation altogether contradict his belonging to that grade.

He may be low—one of the rudest and surliest of working dogs, but he is still a working dog, a trusty watch in the absence of his master from his place of work, a ratter of some renown. He is, to do him justice, removed from the deepest gulf into which dogs and men can sink.

But he is in error on that point of his relations without knowing it; for his truth and honesty, unless under overwhelming temptations, are among his best claims on our regard. Dog of the people as he is, he is not without distinguished kindred. We need not mention his unfortunate great-grand-uncle, who was the avenging shadow over the garret roofs of a certain ruffianly Bill Sykes, and who met the fate which is generally the portion of avenging shadows. He has other claims to a much more distant connection, certainly, but as they are to carry him into the upper regions of society, let them be counted. He has an ancestor in a dog named Trump, who was altogether in a superior position in life, and on his death received the honour of having a monument erected to his memory in the garden of the house at Chiswick which belonged to his attached master, the great painter. Our friend had also a canny Scotch cousin, who bore a part in a famous dialogue delivered in the district of Kyle, in the county of Ayr, and preserved and handed down to posterity.

It is time that we recorded our hero’s name, and began to give some particulars of his not uneventful plebeian history. I dare say my readers conjecture that his name was plebeian too, like all the rest about him—that it was “Jim,” or “Ned,” or “Crab,” or “Pickles,” or “Seize ’em,” or “Tear ’em.” Not at all. In spite of his democratic antecedents and proclivities, he had an aristocratic, nay, a royal designation. My own observation tends to prove that this inconsistent appellation was according to a law of human nature. In the various households belonging to the humblest ranks with which he had any acquaintance, there were to be found specimens of the finest, most sonorous titles in the English nomenclature. There was generally a Gussy or a Louie, and there were twice Fredericks and once a Marmaduke. The dog’s first master styled the waif, either in high-reaching ambition or in smouldering satire, “Prince;” and Prince, not President, he is likely to continue till the day of his death.

It is no reproach to Prince’s powers of memory—which, at the same time, were only remarkable in what were to him the parallel lines of meals and feuds—that they could not carry him back beyond that era in puppyhood when he was found, in one of the back slums of London, doing brave battle with a dog twice his size and age for a gnawed crust.

Unquestionably, Prince had not first seen the light in such a dainty kennel as might have impressed his juvenile imagination, and the loss of which would have made a crisis in his early history. The probability was that he was the puppy of some poor working dog, such as he himself became in after-life; and that the dog’s proprietor, after having tolerated him for a few weeks—during which he showed no signs of growing up of any particular value, and when no fellow-workman fancied the “pup”—had either separated him from his parent, and cast him adrift on the world, or had suffered him to be lost in the street, and thrown on the tender mercies of the police, as the easiest solution of the difficulty—happily less insurmountable than that of Ginx’s spare baby.

But the finder of Prince was not a policeman. He was a little boy named Jack, who was almost as audacious and reckless as the puppy, with the delight of a child in a young dog—especially in a young dog which is treasure-trove, and when there is the fraction of a chance he may be permitted to retain it for his own property. He decoyed Prince, still a nameless little cur, from the fray in which he was engaged, christened him Prince, with a splendid disregard of the proprieties, on the spot, and prepared to convey him home, tucked tightly within Jack’s ragged jacket.

Poor little Prince! pugilistic as he had already shown himself, and as he was doomed to prove throughout his career, he responded then, as he always did, in his gruff fashion, to the scant kindness which was shown him. He did not nestle to Jack’s heart or lick his dirty hand, for he was never a demonstrative dog, but he cocked the ears—short even then, before they had undergone the hideous process of cropping—looked up with his small beads of eyes in his captor’s face, as if acknowledging his master, and then gave one short, stiff wag of his stump of a tail, as if appending his signature—the signature of the puppy-father to the dog whose word was his bond—to the bargain.

That slightly ungracious, yet expressive wag of the tail did Jack’s business, and rendered him ten times more bent on retaining the puppy, in spite of sundry obstacles which he saw looming ahead of the connection, in the prejudices which might be entertained by his father and mother regarding their small means—of which Jack, boy as he was, did not fail to be aware—their limited house accommodation, and the number of his little brothers and sisters.

But if Prince the puppy was father to Prince the dog, so Jack the boy was father to Jack the man. A certain jolly self-indulgence and ignoring of consequences, so long as they could be shelved, were from first to last marked features in his character. When Jack, with his captive, reached the small, swarming, reeking family-room, in which there was always a washing going on, at some stage of the process, his mother did say that they had already as many dogs as there was bran for. And his father, coming in from his last odd job, told the boy to get along, and asked him reproachfully if his father’s dog, Bully, a lame, cantankerous old bull-terrier of dubious origin, and his mother’s birds—canaries and goldfinches, which were her “fad”—were not, together with his numerous little brothers and sisters, pets enough for him?

But Jack was his father and mother’s own boy, and, as it was rather a prosperous time with them, they could not find it in their hearts to baulk him in an inclination with which they had really so much sympathy. So Prince was suffered to become a member of the happy-go-lucky family. The only serious opposition he met with came from his dog-brother, Bully, who assumed a hostile attitude of tooth and claw. However, Bully was old and incapable, so that a tolerably active young dog could manage to escape from the execution of his menaces. Besides, a street accident soon afterwards disposed of the canine patriarch, to the unaffected grief of his master.

Prince grew to dog’s estate in the household, sharing its very fluctuating, but inevitably downward-tending, fortunes, scrambling with it for a livelihood—feasting the one day, fasting the next—receiving a cuff, or a spendthrift dole, as humour and the family purse inclined.

Prince acquired stores of knowledge and experience of a mixed sort at this stage of his existence. He was accustomed to go everywhere with Jack in his spare time—above all, on his half-holidays. Prince enlarged his acquaintance with London; he was not only a regular attendant on all the bird sales and rat-pits in the neighbourhood, but travelled into the suburbs and to the verge of the country. He followed Punch and Judys, and joined in the festivities of Guy Fawkes’ and chimney-sweeps’ days. He went a-palming on the Saturday before Palm Sunday; he was on Hampstead Heath, in Greenwich Park, and Epping Forest, and saw the coloured paper-streamers, and the brilliant crimson and green false beards on successive Easter and Whit Mondays. The wide open spaces, the green grass, the shady trees puzzled him a good deal, but not nearly so much as did the sea, which he once saw in a cheap trip to Brighton, when Jack’s family were in exceptional funds, and spending them like princes.

Prince was never absent from the Boat Race. Year after year, as the day came round, he was to be found stationed by Jack’s side on the Hammersmith Bridge, not half so much incommoded, on account of the pressure—which, indeed, he could keep off by the use of natural weapons—as he had been startled by the wide world of waters, on the edge of which he had stood, with his tail uncertain whether to droop or to curl, at Brighton.

I question whether any dog belonging to the two universities took a greater interest in the race, even though he had been rowed for hours by his attentive master on the Isis or the Cam, than did Prince, in all impartiality; for, though he had a rag of ribbon tied duly round his neck by Jack, Prince at least had no bet either on the light or the dark blue. No more had he any, save the simplest friendly interest, in the winner of the Derby, when he accompanied Jack in an overflowing costermonger’s cart to Epsom Downs. His temper was sorely tried on the way, not merely by the traffic and the clouds of dust, but by the flour warfare, which powdered him white like a miller’s dog. As Prince could not wear a veil, his small eyes were filled till he could hardly blink at the flying hedges, or, after his arrival, at the grand stand, the starting-point, the negro serenaders, and the gipsy fortune-tellers.

On the whole, Prince had a tolerably happy youth, for a dog of his condition, under Jack’s auspices. It might not have been so improving as one could wish, but he learnt some proficiency in shifting for himself, and being philosophical when nothing better offered—a valuable lesson for more than dogs.

Everything comes to an end, and few things sooner, alas! than the hand-to-mouth drifting with the tide of careless, improvident working people. There came a time, at no distant date in Jack’s and Prince’s household, in which there were no longer treats and dainties going. Bacon, buttered toast, and saveloys vanished from the board. Meals became intermittent. Bit after bit of furniture, and every scrap of clothing that could be spared, were put in pawn at one of the shops with the three golden balls above the doorway. The mother of the family was laid down with typhus, and removed to the nearest hospital. Young Gussy and Fred shared the same fate.

Poor Jack, hanging his head, began to speak of parting with Prince. He had often wished he could put him in pawn with the rest of the pledged goods, and borrow a little money on Prince’s capabilities of keeping guard and ratting. Jack had joked in his half-rueful, half-rough fashion on the dogs not eating his head off, since he could hardly tell on what Prince, together with his master’s family, had fed for the last fortnight. Jack knew very well how he and Prince had gone out, in company and separately, after nightfall and in broad day, on the hunt; how they had constituted themselves amateur chiffonniers, and burrowed in the dust heaps for cast-away fragments; how they had hung about the doors of eating-houses and bakers shops for chance crumbs; how they had picked up garbage and been thankful.

But it was one thing to joke and another to dispose, for good and all, of the old dog—he was an old dog now in Jack’s eyes—and that to a customer who was hard-fisted and cross-grained, whose bite and sup Prince would not share, and who could no more be trusted to let old friends meet than he could be expected to redeem the forfeited articles and restore the fallen fortunes of the family gone to the wall.

But Jack, who had been, in his humble way, self-willed and extravagant from his cradle, had already parted with more precious possessions than Prince, and it is to be feared would part with still more before his history was ended. Anyhow, he sold Prince for the merest trifle to a hard buyer; and as tears were in Jack’s dull eyes when he closed the bargain, we will dismiss him with the reluctant reflection that, if he or his progenitors had only owned a single germ of noble self-denial, manly, womanly forethought, plucky, cheery diligence, he might not merely have kept the dog—he and his might have been as independent and well-to-do, and risen as far above want, with its terrible temptations, as any of the gentlefolks in the land.

The inducement which Prince’s new master, Mr. Jerry Noakes, had for the purchase, was that he had enjoyed some opportunity of remarking Prince’s tenacity of purpose and literal discharge of a commission, which he was convinced would render the dog a good watch; while Mr. Jerry was satisfied, from Prince present appearance, that he could be put off with as shabby quarters and meagre fare as will suffice to keep a dog in life. In fact, Mr. Jerry Noakes’ principle, which he found to work well for his ends, was—don’t pamper your dependants on any consideration, if you wish them to be of use to you—on the contrary, grind them down to the last extremity, and all that is in them will be stimulated to do battle with the world on their and your account.

Mr. Jerry Noakes owned a small coal-yard—very small and very little frequented, though its possessor was a man of some substance—but he drew his means from other sources. Still he was not inclined that these slatey-looking, dusty, crumbling piles of coals which were his property should disappear under the predatory attacks of the loafers in a low neighbourhood. Therefore he procured Prince at a cheap rate, inducted him into a couch—which, as it had been knocked together by Mr. Jerry Noakes’ own hands from some rickety deals, was as poor an affair and as wretched a shelter from the weather as could well be imagined—and put him in charge of the yard.

It might be promotion, but it was also a great reverse for Prince. True, he had now a regular meal once a-day, a moderate mess of bran and food for poultry, with the parings of cats’ meat, administered by Mr. Jerry, in place of Prince’s being called upon to forage for himself, with the not uncommon conclusion of finding himself both breakfastless and dinnerless, as had been the case lately in Jack’s family circle. But not only was the gain not large, there was the sentiment of the thing. I hope none of my readers suppose that Prince, though a coarse brute, thick-skinned and obtuse, was destitute of feeling.

In Jack’s home the dog was one of the family; indeed from his very doghood he had rather the best of it. For if men and women, responsible beings, will live, like animals, along with animals, the last—the real Simon Pures—have generally the advantage. Jack’s race, reckless as they were, must surely have been visited with some doubts, some anxieties, some pricking sense that they were wasting their capital of time and capacity for work as well as of wages. But of course Prince was never harassed by such a reminder that he had a conscience, and was at once mortal and immortal. He had his little work to do, and did it to the best of his ability. He was occasionally left to keep house, and did not fail in his trust. He sat beside the tools of Jack’s trade many a day, never offering to stir till Jack released him. He entered with pride and zest into his calling as a rat-catcher whenever he had the chance. But all the time he was largely his own master, for he could hardly call it servitude to roam the world of London at Jack’s heels.

It was another matter for Prince to be a prisoner himself, while prepared to take others prisoners, in this dreary yard—to spend day and night there—to have no change of scene, no comradeship, though it might result in scuffles and single combats with other dogs—to see nobody for a stretch of twenty-four hours, perhaps, except Mr. Jerry Noakes. He always spoke gruffly, never encouragingly, to Prince; and the dog, though he was gruff himself, with little tenderness or humour, so that he was impatient of fondling, and had no great aptitude for fun, yet knew and appreciated what fidelity and good-fellowship meant.

That parting from his first master, Jack, had been a great wrench to Prince’s whole nature; and while the strain of the pull, and the ache of the void, were still in full force, the dog was condemned for his sins to solitary confinement, on the lowest diet, and with no satisfaction of his social instincts, except the brief interview with Mr. Jerry Noakes, his gaoler, who never said, “Hie! old dog,” or “What are you arter to-day, you duffer?” or “Shan’t we have a rove to-night, my beauty?”

Sometimes Prince was so depressed in his spirits that he could not find it in his heart to make a spring, worry, and have done with a cat which, from scrambling idly down on the wall, ventured imprudently to descend into his territory. He contented himself with growling at her, just that she might escape to the wall again, and stand there raising her back and spitting at him, which was an approach to company.

It was a positive relief when the sun was right overhead, blazing down into the little black hole, threatening to produce spontaneous combustion among the materials for fuel which seemed then so unnecessary, and to grill the bones of Prince, lying panting with his tongue out in that couch of his, which neither kept out heat nor cold, and was very far from water-tight—that he could divert his mind from sad thoughts by watching the blue-bottle flies which, for some reason Prince could not divine—if he had got his choice, he would not have selected such quarters—congregated and buzzed lazily about the enclosure. Prince only watched the flies; he was by far too practical and mature a dog to descend—even in his dulness, and although he had not been weak from deficiency of food and overcome by the heat—to anything so childish as catching flies.

I think it was Sir Edwin Landseer himself who said that no dog could endure being kept strictly on the chain for a longer period than three years; that his heart would break, or his reason give way in the interval.

I believe Prince was nearly three years Mr. Jerry Noakes property without either dying or going mad; but then he was a dog of singular powers of endurance, as I have signified; besides, after the first few months of his joint experience of being a gaoler and gaoled, there were modifications introduced into the system which rendered it more bearable to him.

Mr. Jerry Noakes discovered that by the sheer force of habit, and of that defective imagination which prevents some men and dogs, though driven to extremity, from breaking out into independent enterprise, Prince, if let loose for a season, would return doggedly, of his own accord, to his durance on the expiry of a reasonable time. Therefore, when Mr. Jerry was himself on duty at the yard, he would free the dog, and send him out of the gates for a scamper, reflecting with a grin that he saved Prince’s feed that morning—since the dog was sure to nose out some booty in his outing—as well as preserved him in good health.

Even if Prince had, with keen canine sagacity and a yearning heart, sought out his former home, he would still have missed his old protector, for, in sinking lower and lower, the humble street where Jack and his family had dwelt in Prince’s day now knew them no more. The seniors and the younger children had gravitated without fail to the House; while Jack had become peripatetic in his vocation, and moved rapidly from one wretched lodging-house to another.

But, truth to tell, Prince did not attempt to make the discovery. He was too stupid, and too prostrated by slow starvation, to do more than prowl about the immediate neighbourhood of his yard, and stump—for Prince no more slank, not even when he was greatly in the wrong, than he stalked—back to his den when he was weary, or when some occult instinct told him that his leave was up.

Prince was not in some important respects the dog he looks in his picture when he was living with Mr. Jerry Noakes. He is a fairly well-fed dog, and in excellent condition, as we see him; but in those hard times he was reduced to skin and bone, his ribs could be counted, his mongrel disproportions were exposed in all their ugliness, and there was a wild look—that of a creature at bay, and which struck people as unsafe—about the dog.

Yet the lamentable change on the outer dog was not the worst result of Prince’s residence with Mr. Jerry Noakes; the inner dog was undergoing as sure a deterioration. Any good that had been in Prince was being stamped out of him. He was hardening back into the original savage wolf or jackal. His truth and honesty, which had been his best domestic qualities, were being corrupted and sapped to the foundation.

With Jack’s family Prince had been—well, free and easy in his practices; but the whole family had been free and easy in their ways, and anything like deliberate, premeditated larceny was unknown to the dog. There was all the difference that there is between manslaughter and murder in Prince’s helping himself occasionally when the opportunity came unexpectedly in his way, and when he knew that there was no great offence in the deed, and in his craftily planning and brazenly carrying out, in utter impenitence, the series of roll-liftings from the baskets on bakers’ counters, and trotter-snatchings from behind butchers’ doors, in spite of the butchers’ dogs, whose vigilance he managed to evade—by which Prince signalised his absences from the shed.

Mr. Jerry Noakes was right, that Prince needed no regular meal on the day of his temporary release. Indeed, if Mr. Jerry had known how liberally the dog fared on these occasions, the man might have sought covertly to share in the spoil, and might have been tempted, though he had no need, to run the risk of constituting Prince a professional thief and a permanent provider, in a dishonest manner, for the material wants of both.

But Prince’s diabolical cunning, that new and alarming feature in the dog’s character, was too much for his master. Prince took care to despatch every crumb and hair, and get rid of all traces of his unlawful proceedings, before he returned sullenly to his master.

It is all very well to laugh; but the dog, with all his craft, would have been caught red-handed some day and made a public example of, perishing miserably by a violent death, had not Mr. Jerry Noakes’ own death suddenly dissolved the connection between him and Prince. Mr. Jerry Noakes was removed at a moment’s notice from all his grubbing and grinding, and Prince, after narrowly escaping being forgotten and starved to death in the yard, fell into the hands of Mr. Miles Noakes, Mr. Jerry’s nephew and nearest surviving relation.

Mr. Miles was a family man settled in the country, and was called on to sustain the trouble and expense of a journey to London in order to discharge the last duties to Mr. Jerry, and possibly to be rewarded by entering on his inheritance. Those who had known Mr. Jerry said “possibly” advisedly, while they were aware that Mr. Miles was the nearest surviving relation; and the cautious wording of the phrase was vindicated by the sequel. Mr. Jerry had left a will, and bequeathed his gains in two parts—to a more distant relation than Mr. Miles, and who was comparatively rich and in no want of money, and to a charitable institution.

It was just after Mr. Miles had been made acquainted with the disposal of the funds that he, still acting in the character of the representative of the dead man, seeing that the favoured kinsman had not put himself about to attend the funeral, looked into the yard and remarked Prince.

The dog, faithful to the single principle of duty that was left in him, threatened the intruder as furiously as if Prince himself were not an arrant rogue, or as if he were acting out the adage, “Set a thief to catch a thief.”

The dog looked such a miserable object, there was so little to steal, the idea of his revenging himself for being deprived of the succession by pilfering these mouldy coals—if coals can ever be called mouldy—tickled the stranger’s fancy, though this was no laughing occasion, neither was he in any laughing mood.

Mr. Miles, while he had stood in the relation of nephew to Mr. Jerry, was nearly as old a man as his uncle, and, as he lounged there in his rusty black, he bore a certain resemblance to his late father’s brother. He appeared crusty, if not grim, but he possessed what Mr. Jerry had certainly been devoid of—an imagination to take in the ludicrousness of the situation; and he was not altogether selfish and inhuman, for even, while smarting under the injury which had been inflicted on him, and as Prince was flying at him as far as his chain would permit, Mr. Miles said to himself, “I must see that beast put out of pain before I go.”

Then the humour of the man, which had been stirred in him, took a new direction. “I should not care, just for the fun of the thing, to take him down with me to Westbarns and show him to Nanse as our share of Uncle Jerry’s goods. I heard the landlord of the Hare and Hounds say he wanted a serviceable dog to replace his young Newfoundland which he had been induced to sell. I’ll go bail that Uncle Jerry’s dog is serviceable.”

The whim found favour with a whimsical poor man, and so Prince, not without difficulty and danger, was removed to the railway station and consigned to a dog-box. There he was so dazed and confounded by the darkness and the rapid motion—which he had only once experienced before, and that was on that far-away trip to Brighton, when he had been smuggled in Jack’s arms among a hilarious company into an open van—that he came out, in the course of an hour and a half, comparatively subdued, and condescended, without extreme pressure, to accompany Mr. Miles Noakes to his cottage.

It was evening when the two arrived, jaded by travel, excitement, and disappointment. A much younger looking woman than Mr. Miles was a man, was gazing eagerly along the road in expectation of their arrival. She stood at the gate of a well-kept little garden, sweet with spring flowers—blue hyacinths, primroses, polyanthuses. She had lively hazel eyes and smooth dark hair, and wore a neat cap and clean apron. She might have been a capable, prized maid-servant in her day; she was still an active, tidy matron in her early prime.

“You are come at last, Miles; you must be clean done up, but the children are a-bed, and your supper is ready,” she said hurriedly, while she kissed her husband, as if feeling it a relief to welcome him first before she asked the question with which her heart was beating, her breath coming fast and her lips quivering, while she had no attention to spare for his four-footed attendant.

“All right, Nanse,” said Mr. Miles, entering the cottage before he vouchsafed any explanation.

Perhaps his mind misgave him, or his heart smote him with regard to the jest he was about to make, as he looked round on the familiar dwelling—small, not without evidence of narrow means, but scrupulously clean and well ordered, from the gay patched quilt on the crib, in which the two children slept, to the well-scoured pewter mug with his beer flanking the plate of cold bacon, the better part of the dinner saved for his supper.

It would be no jesting matter to Nanse to hear that the property of which he had been summoned to take possession had gone past them. When they had parted, she had not been able to help building on it, in her impulsive woman’s fashion, as what should render them easy in their worldly affairs, lighten the load on their backs, provide a welcome substitute when his strength must fail, and, above all, supply better schooling for the children, and raise them above all fear of want when she alone was left to labour for them.

But Mr. Miles Noakes was not a man easily turned from a purpose, and, it might be, he thought the quip would break the weight of the fall. He said at last, as he took off his hat and placed it carefully beyond the reach of damage, while he gave a jerk of his elbow in the direction of Prince, standing uncertain on the threshold, a most unattractive object in his skeleton leanness, his unthrifty coat, and the greed which the glimpse of the victuals called up—in spite of his clumsy efforts to conceal his feelings—in his winking eyes and sniffing nose—“Well, Nanse, there is our legacy.”

The woman stood bewildered; her colour went and came. “Oh, Miles! you cannot mean it?” she cried at last; “Uncle Jerry and you could not be so cruel?”

“Woman, I had nothing to do with it,” he said, flinging himself heavily into the chair set for him; “and was it not better than to come back empty-handed?”

She understood now that he was in earnest—that he and she had been defrauded, as she called it in her hot heart, of the time, trouble, and expense of his journey, as well as of their justifiable expectations, and that there was nothing left for Miles but to be grimly merry at her expense.

She hesitated, for she was a quick-tempered woman, prone to resent fun of which she was the butt, and any advantage taken of her ignorance. Yet she had loved her husband for the very oddity which expressed itself in this shape. She had been proud of her conquest of him when she had been a pretty, smart, popular servant-girl, and he had enjoyed the reputation of being the most “humoursome,” no less than the most long-headed, steady, middle-aged bachelor in the place. His humour, even in company with his long-headedness and steadiness, had not brought him great worldly prosperity, yet she had never regretted her choice. There must have been a strain of something uncommon in Nanse herself, which had enabled her, in the first instance, to appreciate what was remarkable in her future husband and to triumph in astonishing the world by accepting him from her host of wooers, and, in the second, to remain content with her bargain.

But it is one thing to relish a queer fish’s cranky wit played off on other people and on things in general, and quite another to value the same rare quality turned against one’s self in a supreme moment of mortification and vexation.

Nanse stood motionless for an instant, and was on the verge of getting into a white heat and saying something she would have regretted afterwards, when the corner of her eye caught sight of her husband’s grey hairs, while her ears seemed to take in the echo of a break in his voice. Her heart was as warm as her temper was quick. With a flash of sympathy she realised all his fatigue and chagrin, and pain for her pain, which he was seeking to carry off by his poor joke. She was at his side in a moment, entering into his humour, though with a lump in her throat and a dimness before her eyes.

“Dear heart alive!” she exclaimed, borrowing one of her old mother’s expressions; “it must be a rare monster, Miles; I should have said it was not worth the carriage, but Uncle Jerry and you must know best. In the meantime, let it be, and eat your supper like a good man. I’m right down thankful to have you safe home again, and the children are both pretty well, and fell asleep an hour ago wearying for your kisses.”

“You’re a good soul, Nanse,” muttered Mr. Miles down in his throat in the pauses between bolting mouthfuls of bacon. “Come and have your supper with me, lass, and I’ll kiss you again as soon as I have finished.”

Mr. and Mrs. Miles had no thought save of disposing of Prince to the landlord of the Hare and Hounds the first thing next morning, though they gave him, as a matter of course also, the scraps of their supper and leave to sleep at their hearth.

But the new day brought new ideas. Little Freddy—named proudly for Nanse’s little master in the last situation she had filled—fell sick in the night, and was still ill and cross in the morning when Nanse rose to light the fire and prepare the breakfast. Mr. Miles, who kept the child while the mother was thus engaged, thought to divert the boy, and partly succeeded, by drawing his attention to the strange bow-wow which daddy had brought home while Freddy was asleep last night.

“You had better leave the brute all the morning, Miles, since Freddy is so taken with him,” suggested the anxious mother. “Pretty dear! he has left off crying to watch the dog. I suppose the creature will be quiet enough if nobody meddles with him, and I shall take care that neither Freddy nor Louie teases him. You will be in and out, and you can take the dog away at dinner-time quite as well as now. Perhaps the child will be better then.”

When the dinner hour came the child was not better, but worse, lying listlessly with flushed face and heavy eyes, which, however, still lightened a little as they followed the entrancing apparition of the dog. Mr. and Mrs. Miles could not bear to remove the solace of their sick child, and hour by hour and day by day the departure of Prince was deferred.

In this period of probation I am glad to say that Prince’s conduct was irreproachable. As Nanse fed the dog regularly, that the child, who could not eat himself, might have the pleasure of seeing the dog eat, and with a faint hope that Freddy might be induced to follow the “doggie’s” example, Prince was not exposed to the temptation of hunger, which had already proved too much for his virtue. For that matter he had not stolen in private houses, his depredations had been committed in shops, and his dulness was in his favour at this epoch, as it did not suggest an analogy between Nanse’s little larder and the regions from which he had been wont to pick and steal.

Then it was found true here, as elsewhere, that if there is any lingering remnant of good in the rudest, most brutalised man or dog, a helpless little child will call it forth. Prince, as a rule, hated fondling, but he had some experience of children. Though Jack had been twice Freddy’s age when he appropriated the dog—a strong puppy in the street, Jack had always possessed, more or less, small brothers and sisters, with whom Prince had been on friendly, familiar terms. Prince knew, therefore, that fondlings and sundry other liberties—such as clutching him round the neck, or pulling him by the tail—must be put up with from senseless little children, although no dog of spirit would stand them for a moment from grown-up, rational people.

Prince sat like patience on a monument, and permitted Freddy to stroke his bristly hair backwards with hot little hands, or to hold on by his ears, without uttering one note of protest, till Mrs. Miles cried out of her full heart to her husband, “Miles, let us keep the dog ourselves; we’re not so hard up or so near that we’ll miss his bite. We’ve had no cat since poor Kitty was took in the rabbit warren. He may earn something for his living if he can be got to go out and do a turn at ratting for a neighbour at a time. Anyway, he can always watch your dinner till you’re ready, when you carry it with you to your place of work; and he is good to the child. I feel as if dear little Freddy will get well again, and that the dog may bring luck to the house, though he came to it at an unlucky time.”

Of course, and very properly, Mr. Miles laughed and scouted at Prince’s bringing luck; and it was not in consequence of any such vain womanish superstition, but because families like Mr. Miles’ are tolerably sure on the whole, and in spite of troubles, to rise in the social scale—just as families like poor Jack’s are as certain to decline, that the occupants of the cottage did begin to prosper from the hour that Prince crossed their threshold.

Prince himself knew when he was in good quarters, and showed the knowledge satisfactorily, by continuing to be on his best behaviour, till he commenced to forget his worst, and to be good as if goodness were a second nature to him. He thawed manifestly in his surliness to more than the children, whose trusty play-fellow he was. He showed himself faithful, obedient, attentive, as far as his understanding went, and decently civil and discreet.

I wish I could state that Prince became in all respects a superior dog, or at least that he lost his overweening opinion of himself, and became capable of reverencing, at a humble distance, really great dogs—instead of cracking vulgar jokes at their expense, and seeking to drag them down to his own level—or that he even altogether got rid of that lowered moral standard and grave deterioration which he suffered during his stay in Mr. Jerry Noakes’ yard.

I am sorry to say I can make no such assertion. On the contrary, it was a great shock to Mrs. Miles, who was pre-eminently an honest woman, to discover that Prince—fairly to be relied upon at home—could not come within a hundred yards of the baker’s and butcher’s shops in the village without undergoing a distressing transformation. He would slip away from his mistress’ side, if he happened to be out marketing with her, dodge about with an evident disreputable assumption of an incognito, for he was but a fifth-rate actor after all, till he saw his opportunity, then improve it by darting to the scene of action, seizing the coveted twopenny loaf or sheep’s liver, though he had made an excellent breakfast that very morning, and making off with it like the wind.

It was to no purpose that he was pursued, convicted, punished; the next time temptation met him, he fell without fail, repeating the offence. It was as if the temptation, once habitually indulged in, had become irresistible to poor stupid Prince.

Mrs. Miles had a struggle whether she ought to keep a dog with such a disgraceful propensity, and one day she was very nearly giving him up, when by his gross self-indulgence he covered not only her but his master with ridicule and shame.

It was on a Sunday at noon, of all times, but Mrs. Miles had not been to church—she had sat up, the night before, with a sick neighbour. She had carried the younger child with her on her errand of mercy, while Mr. Miles had taken care of the elder, and been at church with him, leaving Prince to keep house, which he did with sufficient uprightness, in the family’s absence.

Mr. Miles had gone home when the service was over, and liberated the dog, permitting him to join the little party, in their Sunday clothes, that set out to meet and greet the wife and mother on her expected return.

Mrs. Miles had appeared duly, and been gratified by her husband’s attention. The group were proceeding in the most exemplary and agreeable fashion along the village street, when the heads of the household were startled by the nudges and sniggles, rising into roars of laughter, which their progress drew forth—not only from the loiterers about the ale-house door, but from the more decorous passers-by, carrying home their Sunday’s dinner from the baker’s oven.

Mrs. Miles glanced round indignantly at her husband and two children, and could discover nothing—unless a pleasing picture of domestic felicity, which ought to have excited admiration or envy, not contempt—to account for the derision with which even some of her own particular friends were regarding the family, till she looked behind her, and then Mrs. Miles saw it all.

To her horror, Mrs. Miles found that Prince was scouring along close to heel, bearing a whole roast duck by his teeth in its back. He had been unable to pass the baker’s door, though the shutter was on the window: having entered, his nose had beguiled him into a more daring and serious crime than the petty pilfering which was the usual extent of his delinquencies. And Mrs. Miles could not create the scandal on the Sunday, with the parson coming out of the rectory at her back, of having the dog pursued and deprived of his prey.

That night, while Mr. Miles—though he had not liked the laugh when it was sounding in his ears any better because he had often raised such himself—after he had escaped the cackle, took the matter easily, like a philosopher, Mrs. Miles was, as she would have described it, “in a sad way;” she felt as if her own and her husband’s good name were at stake, and that they might be unjustly accused of sharing in the toothsome dainty, basely come by, and for which some Sunday dinner had waited in vain. She renounced Prince with a groan. But next morning, when the dog stood letting Freddy harness him with pack-thread, Nanse thought better of it. She judged correctly that Prince was only a dumb brute; when the worst came to the worst, she was not certain whether Uncle Jerry were not accountable for Prince’s bad tricks, and whether she and Miles, as Uncle Jerry’s representatives, did not owe the dog some reparation for the cruel wrong done him.

At the same time, she was careful to relieve her conscience and clear her credit by solemnly warning the baker and butcher, and going so far as to offer to pay for any amount of plunder with regard to which it could be proved that it had not been left carelessly, after her caution, in the dog’s way.

The tradesmen, to whom Mrs. Miles always paid her bills to a day, took her communication in good part, and even generously tossed to Prince an occasional crust or bone, which, nevertheless, had not the effect of curing him of his culpable weakness. But Mrs. Miles left him as few chances as possible of lapsing into his one inveterate vice.

With this, alas! flagrant exception, Prince ended by being a tolerably respectable character, in the favourable circumstances to which he was so fortunate as to attain at last.