Most unintentionally I seem to have wandered from dogs and strayed into the domain of metaphysics--or do I mean theology? I don’t know anything about metaphysics or theology, but I know a great deal about dogs, and it was some dogs I had in mind when I sat down to write. Through a sad, autumn rain I have been staring out of my window into the garden where, side by side, some of them are buried; Friday, Thursday, Tatito, Spy, Rowdy, and--it is but a few lonely weeks that he has been there--Boozy. Mud, an Irish staghound, is at rest on a hillside in Dakota, and Jigger, whom I rarely see now, as he unfortunately for me does not belong to me, is fat, gray, capricious, but still alive, still adorable and adored. How they emerge and come back to me as I stand and look at the frost-bitten hollyhocks on the graves! What individuality each one had; how absolutely different they were; how inseparable they are from any retrospect of my youth--from, indeed, my whole life. With but few intermissions I cannot remember the time when some one of them did not play an intimate, an important, a memorable part in the little drama of my existence. Scarcely any phase of it fails to comprehend one of them. I feel myself thinking of them exactly as I think of the members of my family whom I have cared for, who did what it was intended that they should do and who then quietly left. To describe them, to dwell on their traits of character, their mannerisms, their little faults and eccentricities, the setness of their ways as they gradually grew older and then old, would seem to me to be an indelicacy if I did not realize that to most persons a dog is just a dog.