Early in life, he contracted--from evil association, perhaps--a vulgar trick of running after carriages and barking at the horses' heels, a trick of which I in vain tried to break him. Once, when he was about a year old, I took him up beside me into a high _calèche_, in which we were going some distance. The moment the horse started, Sam jumped out to have a bark at his heels, when, to my horror, the wheel of the vehicle, in which there were three of us, went right over the middle of his body, cutting him, apparently, in two; but he was up in a second, and barking at heels and wheels for half a mile before we could pull up and get him in again. This accident appeared to decide him in the choice of a profession, for he devoted himself energetically, from that hour, to the pursuit and baying-at of all manner of wheeled things propelled by horse-power. A rat he would never touch, although I introduced him to one before he was a year old; he manifested neither fear of the vermin, nor surprise at it, but simply took no interest in it. He had much pleasure in worrying cats; but that was owing, I fancy, to a sad discomfiture he once met with from one. Walking through a suburb one day, with Sammy trotting before me in dreamy mood, to which he was much given, a small, but remarkably severe cat made a sudden and very fierce dash at him from a cottage-door, taking him so completely aback, that he tumbled, head over tail, into a deep, dirty pool of green, stagnant water, such as is usually to be seen in the pleasure-grounds environing a suburbo-Hibernian shanty. His appearance, on emerging from that cesspool, was the reverse of majestic; but the incident gave him such an idea on the subject of cats, that he always persecuted them remorselessly from that day; nor did he ever again walk through a suburb in any other frame of mind than a particularly wide-awake one, and with his tail up. These dogs are curiously sensitive about their dignity, and sometimes do not recover their elasticity of spirits for several days after having undergone a process of correction. I recollect a singular instance of this sensitiveness displayed by Sambo, in which he also manifested a kind of inferential power wonderfully akin to reason.