Well, if Dog has never invented so much even as a patent rat-trap,--a thing, you see, that might have saved him some labor,--if he persists in disregarding the majesty of Fashion, and continues to move about in society with the same kind of coat on his back as that worn by his first ancestor, hatless, disaffected of shoes, and totally obtuse to the amenity of an umbrella,--if, in fact, his only approach to humanity, as distinguished by apparel, is his occasional adoption of a collar precisely similar in general effect to those in which Fashion, empress of Broadway and of a great many other ways, condemns her wretched votaries to partial strangulation,--well, say I again, in spite of all this, Dog is prime company. Intimately associated as I have been from earliest boyhood with many excellent fellows of the family, from social communion with which I am at present debarred only by the direful necessity of dwelling in lodgings,--a necessity which, if distasteful to Man, to Dog, oh, how fatal!--bound, I may say, as I was for years, not by straps and chains only, but by ties of confident friendship also, to canine comrades possessing the purest elements of worth and humor, it is to me a task not altogether devoid of interest to fall back on such memories as may enable me to chronicle a few reminiscences of the nobilities and eccentricities of the race. Before I discourse of individual dogs of the present century, however, with whom I have had the pleasure of being personally acquainted, let me reproduce the following short tale of a dog from an old French volume,--a tome fittingly adorned with ears of that noble animal innumerable.