Idle Ideas in 1905Jerome, Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka)
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Idle Ideas in 1905
Jerome, Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka)
English essays; English wit and humor
Not only the foreign man, woman and child, but the foreign dog is born
good. In England, if you happen to be the possessor of a dog, much of
your time is taken up dragging him out of fights, quarrelling with the
possessor of the other dog as to which began it, explaining to irate
elderly ladies that he did not kill the cat, that the cat must have died
of heart disease while running across the road, assuring disbelieving
game-keepers that he is not your dog, that you have not the faintest
notion whose dog he is. With the foreign dog, life is a peaceful
proceeding. When the foreign dog sees a row, tears spring to his eyes:
he hastens on and tries to find a policeman. When the foreign dog sees a
cat in a hurry, he stands aside to allow her to pass. They dress the
foreign dog—some of them—in a little coat, with a pocket for his
handkerchief, and put shoes on his feet. They have not given him a
hat—not yet. When they do, he will contrive by some means or another to
raise it politely when he meets a cat he thinks he knows.
One morning, in a Continental city, I came across a disturbance—it might
be more correct to say the disturbance came across me: it swept down upon
me, enveloped me before I knew that I was in it. A fox-terrier it was,
belonging to a very young lady—it was when the disturbance was to a
certain extent over that we discovered he belonged to this young lady.
She arrived towards the end of the disturbance, very much out of breath:
she had been running for a mile, poor girl, and shouting most of the way.
When she looked round and saw all the things that had happened, and had
had other things that she had missed explained to her, she burst into
tears. An English owner of that fox-terrier would have given one look
round and then have jumped upon the nearest tram going anywhere. But, as
I have said, the foreigner is born good. I left her giving her name and
address to seven different people.
But it was about the dog I wished to speak more particularly. He had
commenced innocently enough, trying to catch a sparrow. Nothing delights
a sparrow more than being chased by a dog. A dozen times he thought he
had the sparrow. Then another dog had got in his way. I don’t know what
they call this breed of dog, but abroad it is popular: it has no tail and
looks like a pig—when things are going well with it. This particular
specimen, when I saw him, looked more like part of a doormat. The
fox-terrier had seized it by the scruff of the neck and had rolled it
over into the gutter just in front of a motor cycle. Its owner, a large
lady, had darted out to save it, and had collided with the motor cyclist.
The large lady had been thrown some half a dozen yards against an Italian
boy carrying a tray load of plaster images.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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