Rarer than conjugal affection amongst animals, is friendship between individuals of the same sex; of this, too, instances are not wanting. Mr. Youatt relates the following:--“Two Dogs, the property of a gentleman at Shrewsbury, had been companions for many years, until one of them died of old age. The survivor immediately began to manifest an extraordinary degree of restless anxiety, searching for his old associate in all his former haunts, and refusing every kind of food. He gradually wasted away, and at the expiration of the tenth day he died, the victim of an attachment that would have done honour to man.” Of equally intense devotion to man, instances are so numerous that one hardly knows which to mention. None is, perhaps, more wonderful or more affecting than that we have already mentioned, of the Dog who watched for three months by the corpse of his dead master on Helvellyn. There is also a tale of a Newfoundland Dog, whose master--a soldier--returned to his home, after an absence of many years, when the Dog recognised him at once, “leaped upon his neck, licked his face, and died.” He must have retained, during the whole of the time his master was away, the memory of his care and friendship. One cannot doubt that he often thought of and longed for him; and the rush of joy and hope fulfilled was too much for the great heart of the noble animal. He succumbed to the intensity of his feelings, thereby showing himself to be superior in one of the highest and grandest of qualities to by far the greater proportion of the human race. How many men, or even women, of one’s own acquaintance, are _capable_ of dying of joy?