Conscience says, "Do you mean to say you should be sorry to find out the real owner?" "Really, conscience," you reply, "there can be no harm in being sorry; but you are becoming very impertinent, and asking too many questions." Here conscience nods--is asleep--is in a coma, Eusebius--fairly mesmerized by you, and follows you at your beck wherever you choose to lead her. And so you take her to your stable to look at Rover: and you want a suggestion how you can stop Rover's wandering propensities; and conscience, being in a state of _clairvoyance_, bids you tie him up. You ask how--"by the teeth;" so you order him a good plate of meat inside, your stable-door locked, and you replenish that plate for a week or more, and have a few conferences with Rover in your parlour--and the dog is tied. Then you didn't like the name of Rover--but liked Chance. Conscience suggested the name as a palliative, as something between true proprietorship and theft--it gave you a protective right, and took away the sting of the possession. You fortified yourself in this position, as cunningly as the French at Tahiti. But how happened it, Eusebius, that when any friend asked you if you had found the owner, you turned off the subject always so ingeniously, or denied that you had a Rover, but one Chance, certainly a fine dog?--and how came it that you never took him in the direction of the country from whence the regiment had come? And yet, if the truth could be known, would it not turn out, Eusebius, that fears did often come across your pleasures, and your affection for Chance? and had a child but asked you, as you might have been crossing a stile, in quest, with Chance before you, as you did the soldier, "whose dog's that?" you would have stammered a little--and almost, in your affection, have gone down upon your knees to have begged him as a gift; and it is fearful to think what a sum any knave as cunning as yourself had been, would have got out of you. Now, my dear Eusebius, I entreat you, when you shall read or hear read--"Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing," that you think of Chance, and not of _his doing_, but _yours_. I dare to say, you have never quite looked at the affair in this light; we all are apt to wash our hands of a troublesome affair, and think we come with them clean into court.