Yet I detest her howl. It always gives me a feeling of vague disquiet, like the uneasiness that precedes the horror of nightmare. It makes me afraid,—indefinably, superstitiously afraid. Perhaps what I am writing will seem to you absurd; but you would not think it absurd if you once heard her howl. She does not howl like the common street-dogs. She belongs to some ruder Northern breed, much more wolfish, and retaining wild traits of a very peculiar kind. And her howl is also peculiar. It is incomparably weirder than the howl of any European dog; and I fancy that it is incomparably older. It may represent the original primitive cry of her species,—totally unmodified by centuries of domestication. It begins with a stifled moan, like the moan of a bad dream,—mounts into a long, long wail, like a wailing of wind,—sinks quavering into a chuckle,—rises again to a wail, very much higher and wilder than before,—breaks suddenly into a kind of atrocious laughter,—and finally sobs itself out in a plaint like the crying of a little child. The ghastliness of the performance is chiefly—though not entirely—in the goblin mockery of the laughing tones as contrasted with the piteous agony of the wailing ones: an incongruity that makes you think of madness. And I imagine a corresponding incongruity in the soul of the creature. I know that she loves me,—that she would throw away her poor life for me at an instant’s notice. I am sure that she would grieve if I were to die. But she would not think about the matter like other dogs,—like a dog with hanging ears, for example. She is too savagely close to Nature for that. Were she to find herself alone with my corpse in some desolate place, she would first mourn wildly for her friend; but, this duty performed, she would proceed to ease her sorrow in the simplest way possible,—by eating him,—by cracking his bones between those long wolf’s-teeth of hers. And thereafter, with spotless conscience, she would sit down and utter to the moon the funeral cry of her ancestors. It fills me, that cry, with a strange curiosity not less than with a strange horror,—because of certain extraordinary vowellings in it which always recur in the same order of sequence, and must represent particular forms of animal speech,—particular ideas. The whole thing is a song,—a song of emotions and thoughts not human, and therefore humanly unimaginable. But other dogs know what it means, and make answer over the miles of the night,—sometimes from so far away that only by straining my hearing to the uttermost can I detect the faint response. The words—(if I may call them words)—are very few; yet, to judge by their emotional effect, they must signify a great deal. Possibly they mean things myriads of years old,—things relating to odors, to exhalations, to influences and effluences inapprehensible by duller human sense,—impulses also, impulses without name, bestirred in ghosts of dogs by the light of great moons.