This was not a question of self-preservation on the part of the dog. He was in the streets taking his morning run when his mistress took the narcotic. Knowing he would return shortly she left the outer door of her apartment ajar. The dog, had he been actuated by an instinct for self-preservation, might easily have fled from the flaming room and aroused the house by his barks. Instead he risked his own life to drag his mistress from the jaws of death. Another dog hero lived on Avenue A: To him fate was not so kind as to the collie. When scarcely more than a pup he saved the life of a child. It is true the child was unknown to him, and his saving it was treated as a casual happening. Out walking at his master’s heels on a Sunday afternoon, he chanced to be passing at the instant that a two-year-old child, having climbed on top of the one plank wall separating the island of Manhattan from the waters of East River, fell in. “Right in after it went Buster, quicker’n a wink,” the master, a little old cripple, told me when I paid my first call on this hero. “I’d taught ’im to jump in the river after sticks. I guess when he heard that baby’s splash he thought it was a stick. He was right there when she comes up, an’ got his teeth tangled in her skirts somehow. The way he paddled with those front paws of his’n. He kept his grip till they could get a boat to ’im and take the baby. Then Buster swum back to shore. He was that far gone I had to help ’im land.” While listening to the old man I was seated in his shop in the rear of one of the oldest and most dilapidated tenements in my district. Besides being the janitor of the tenement he was a mender of pots, pans, and all things of metal. The corners of his shop were heaped with a miscellaneous collection of metal articles, useful and ornamental, most of them of brass, copper, or wrought iron. “I mends ’em and brushes ’em up a bit when work is slack,” he explained, while tinkering an old brass kettle, mending a leak near the gracefully curved spout. "It’s surprisin’ the price some people will pay for that old junk when I rubs it up a bit. “Don’t need to have no clock down here,” the old man went on, enjoying my interest in his dog. “Ten o’clock, twelve, three, and six, sharp, Buster comes for me. Them’s the times my wife takes her medicine—she’s bedrid, been like that twenty years. I used to try teasin’ Buster, made like I didn’t hear ’im bark. He caught on. Now he just puts his head in that door and barks onct and back he trots. He knows that’s his job, I guess.” “His job?” I questioned, not understanding the tinker’s reference. Having finished mending the kettle he put it to one side and took up a grinning black face—part of an old wrought-iron fire-dog.