It is the fashion of mortality to pass away--but that does not alter the sadness of it--of losing what we love. As surely as we have friends or pets, so surely shall we know the pain of loss--fortunate only if there has been between us such true love that the memory thereof abides. Such love there was between Mr. Edmund Yates and Nelly, the story of whose life he told me in the following letter of September, 1887: “Your letter finds me mourning the loss of the one pet animal of my life. In the year 1878, having taken a country place, and being in want of an animal as companion, I went to the Dogs’ Home at Battersea, and on visiting the kennels, was at once struck with the piteous and earnest expression on the face of a female collie, looking up, with many others, through the wire netting; an expression which said, as plainly as possible, ‘Take me out of this, for Heaven’s sake, and I will be loving and true.’ I could learn nothing of her previous history, but I paid a sovereign for her, and took her away with me in a cab; and from that hour to the day of her death, just two months ago, Nelly, as I called her, was the light of my household, and won the admiration and love of all who saw her. [Illustration: NELLY, THE DOG OF EDMUND YATES.] “Under kind treatment she developed into a very handsome dog, never large, but wonderfully graceful, leaping and bounding like a deer. Her back was a reddish-brown, her chest and paws beautifully white; she looked bright and intelligent, and her eyes had a certain wistful expression, which is well reproduced in the accompanying photograph. She was not particularly clever. She seemed to say, like one of Tennyson’s heroines: “‘I cannot understand, I love.’ “She was always with me, and in places which I frequent, she was thoroughly well-known; she lay opposite me in the carriage, on the deck of my steam-launch, with her nose up in the air, sniffing the fresh breeze to windward. (‘See the kind-eyed old collie; on the deck, in the sunshine, she loves to recline,’ sang my friend Ashby-Sterry of her in one of his pretty Lazy Minstrel Lays.) “She followed me in my long rides on horseback, over down and through wood, ranging far away on her own business, but ever and anon coming back to see how I was getting on. She lay at my feet in my library, and slept on a couch at the bottom of my bed. About eighteen months before her death, she developed signs of failing sight, and gradually grew totally blind. This blindness was the cause of an accident on which I do not care to dwell, but which necessitated her destruction; and on the twenty-seventh of July she passed away without a pang. She lies buried in the garden here, at the foot of a flag-staff, and on her prettily turfed grave is the following inscription: HERE LIES NELLY A COLLIE DOG; FOR NINE YEARS A MUCH LOVED FRIEND, GENTLE, AFFECTIONATE, AND TRUE. DIED JULY 27TH, 1887. E. Y., L. K. Y., A. M. B., W. W.