To me, an inability to love a dog is comprehensible only in the same sense I can comprehend that an uncle of mine, who had a delightful talent for drawing, was hopelessly color-blind, and that another member of my family and two of my friends are what is called “tone-deaf.” You might play to them the introduction to “Lohengrin” and then “Annie Rooney” at regular intervals every day for a month, and at the end of that time it would be impossible for them to tell which was which. In other respects adequately equipped, they were simply born without the apparatus necessary to distinguish between one combination of musical sounds and another. They all hate to admit that music gives them little or no pleasure; one of them has even gone so far as to become, in an amateur way, an authority on the history and theory of music, but if in his presence some one begins to play the piano, he is always pathetically unaware as to whether he is listening to a nocturne by Chopin, or a cakewalk sung into popularity by May Irwin. Persons who “like dogs in their place” always seem to me to have been born with much the same sort of defect--or perhaps it would be kinder and truer to call it an omission. But then, my attitude toward dogs may be abnormal. I don’t know. I can only recall a lecture by William Dean Howells in which, when he paused to give some incidental advice to young writers, he said, in effect, “In writing, never hesitate to express what you feel is a thought, a sensation or a state of mind peculiar to yourself. It never _is_ peculiar to yourself. The paragraph you shrink from writing because you feel it will be understood by you alone, is the one that will be read with the most sympathetic interest.” (After all these years I cannot quote Mr. Howells verbatim, but that was his idea; it deeply impressed me.) So here goes.