But if Prince the puppy was father to Prince the dog, so Jack the boy was father to Jack the man. A certain jolly self-indulgence and ignoring of consequences, so long as they could be shelved, were from first to last marked features in his character. When Jack, with his captive, reached the small, swarming, reeking family-room, in which there was always a washing going on, at some stage of the process, his mother did say that they had already as many dogs as there was bran for. And his father, coming in from his last odd job, told the boy to get along, and asked him reproachfully if his father’s dog, Bully, a lame, cantankerous old bull-terrier of dubious origin, and his mother’s birds—canaries and goldfinches, which were her “fad”—were not, together with his numerous little brothers and sisters, pets enough for him? But Jack was his father and mother’s own boy, and, as it was rather a prosperous time with them, they could not find it in their hearts to baulk him in an inclination with which they had really so much sympathy. So Prince was suffered to become a member of the happy-go-lucky family. The only serious opposition he met with came from his dog-brother, Bully, who assumed a hostile attitude of tooth and claw. However, Bully was old and incapable, so that a tolerably active young dog could manage to escape from the execution of his menaces. Besides, a street accident soon afterwards disposed of the canine patriarch, to the unaffected grief of his master. Prince grew to dog’s estate in the household, sharing its very fluctuating, but inevitably downward-tending, fortunes, scrambling with it for a livelihood—feasting the one day, fasting the next—receiving a cuff, or a spendthrift dole, as humour and the family purse inclined. Prince acquired stores of knowledge and experience of a mixed sort at this stage of his existence. He was accustomed to go everywhere with Jack in his spare time—above all, on his half-holidays. Prince enlarged his acquaintance with London; he was not only a regular attendant on all the bird sales and rat-pits in the neighbourhood, but travelled into the suburbs and to the verge of the country. He followed Punch and Judys, and joined in the festivities of Guy Fawkes’ and chimney-sweeps’ days. He went a-palming on the Saturday before Palm Sunday; he was on Hampstead Heath, in Greenwich Park, and Epping Forest, and saw the coloured paper-streamers, and the brilliant crimson and green false beards on successive Easter and Whit Mondays. The wide open spaces, the green grass, the shady trees puzzled him a good deal, but not nearly so much as did the sea, which he once saw in a cheap trip to Brighton, when Jack’s family were in exceptional funds, and spending them like princes.