“Starve Flush! Starve Flush! My dear Mr. Westwood, what are you thinking of?... He is fat, certainly--but he has been fatter ... and he may, therefore, become thinner. And then he does not eat after the manner of dogs. I never saw a dog with such a lady-like appetite. To eat two small biscuits in succession is generally more than he is inclined to do. When he has meat it is only once a day, and it must be so particularly well cut up and offered to him on a fork, and he is so subtly discriminative as to differences between boiled mutton and roast mutton, and roast chicken and boiled chicken, that often he walks away in disdain, and will have none of it.... “My nearest approach to starving Flush is to give general instructions to the servant who helps him to his dinner, ‘not to press him to eat.’ I know he ought not to be fat--I know it too well--and his father being, according to Miss Mitford’s account, ‘square,’ at this moment, there is an hereditary reason for fear. So he is not to be ‘pressed.’” Flush left England with his mistress after her marriage, and lived to a good old age in her Italian home. His doggish heart was never torn by seeing younger, more agile pets preferred to himself. Secure in the only affection he valued, he passed quietly out of life; and nothing now remains of his mortality save a lock of hair, which was treasured by Robert Browning. One word more of Miss Mitford. Her chief favorite was the greyhound Mossy, who died in 1819. She wrote an account of his death which no one ever saw until it was found, after her own death, sealed in an envelope, together with some of his hair. It repeats the well-known burden of the faithful lamenting the faithful: “No human being was ever so faithful, so gentle, so generous, and so fond. I shall never love anything half so well.” Robert Browning declared himself a partisan of cats and owls--tastes which have suggested different gifts from friends. An owl inkstand on his desk seemed to be brooding over the thoughts whisked out of it by Browning’s pen; an owl paper-weight steadied these same thoughts when transferred to paper. Stuffed owls, pictured owls, looked down upon him as he wrote. With regard to cats, who have much secret affinity with owls, his opinions were equally liberal, and he notes with the eye of an artist their wonderful grace and beauty. A friend of the Brownings in Florence, Miss Isa Blagden, had many pets of her own, charitably gathered from the ranks of the distressed. She is probably best known to American readers by her poem to Bushie, the favorite dog of Charlotte Cushman. [Illustration: BUSHIE, THE FAVORITE DOG OF CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN.] Sensitive, nervous and loving was Bushie, her greatest pleasure being the society of her mistress, her greatest grievance being left at home when the family went out riding. In this case Bushie’s grief was hysterical, and required careful soothing ere it abated.