[A] By a recent decision of the Supreme Court of Maine, the judges standing six to one, it was decided that dogs are not to be classed with domestic animals. The learned Court affirms "that they retain in great measure their vicious habits, furnish no support to the family, add nothing in a legal sense to the wealth of the community, and are not inventoried as property of a debtor or dead man's estate, or as liable to taxation except under a special provision of the statute; that when kept it is for pleasure, or, if any usefulness is obtained from them, it is founded upon the ferocity natural to them, by which they are made to serve as a watch or for hunting; and that while because of his attachment to his master, from which arises a well-founded expectation of his return when lost, the law gives the owner the right of reclamation, the owner in all other respects has only that qualified property in them which he may have in wild animals generally." RENA'S WARNING. "If anything be anything," said Frederick Brent, "the Pennsylvania mountains are what Oscar Wilde called them." "Oh, you miserable agnostic!" exclaimed his friend Professor Helfenstein. "Can you not, in the face of this so beautiful landscape, get rid of your eternal subjunctive mood? _If_, indeed!" The two men had stopped at a high point on the road they had been traversing, and were looking across a fair and fertile valley, flooded by the summer-morning sunlight, to the mountains on its western rim. A slight smile showed Brent's pleasure in arousing his companion's indignation. "Well," said he, "my ideas of natural beauty and those of the æsthetic Wilde may be entirely false; or the whole scene may be an optical illusion; or--_Rosenduft und Maienblumen_, observe me this lovely maiden!" "If anything be anything? You can be positive enough where a pretty girl is concerned. She _is_ pretty, though, and as _deutsch_ as her ancestors were a century or two ago, when they left the Rhineland and crossed the sea. A pure blonde German type. Tacitus would have included her among the Non-Suevi." Their attention had been drawn from the scenery by the approach of a young woman and a little boy. The former was above the medium height, and was about twenty years old, but the infantile mould of her features and the innocent look in her large blue eyes gave strangers a bewildering impression that she was somewhere in the neighborhood of five. She was charmingly pretty in her way, and her wide-brimmed hat of dark straw set off to full advantage the pale golden hue of her braided hair and the delicate purity of her complexion. Brent could not resist the temptation to accost this mild and grave young beauty. Stepping forward as she was passing, he lifted his hat, and said, "Will you be good enough to tell me the way to the nearest encampment of Indians?" "Indians?" she repeated, with a timid wonder in the tones of her soft voice.