With some of my most esteemed and patriotic friends the matter is more simple; their generosity in concession fills me with admiration and their forbearance in demand challenges my astonishment as one of the seven wonders of American hospitality. In fancy I see the ceremony of their “presentation,” and as examples of simple republican dignity I commend their posture to the youth of this fair New World, inviting particular attention to the grand, bold curves of character shown in the outlines of the human ham. DOG I Of all anachronisms and survivals the love of the dog is the most reasonless. Because, some thousands of years ago, when we all wore other skins than our own and sat enthroned upon our haunches, tearing tangles of tendons from raw bones with our teeth, the dog ministered purveyorwise to our savage needs, we go on cherishing him to this day, when his only function is to lie sun-soaken on a door mat and insult us as we pass in and out enamored of his fat superfluity. One dog in a thousand earns his bread—and takes beefsteak; the other nine hundred and ninety-nine we maintain in the style suitable to their state by cheating the poor. The trouble with the modern dog is that he is the same old dog. Not an inch has the rascal advanced along the line of evolution. We have ceased to squat upon our naked haunches and gnaw raw bones, but this companion of the childhood of the race, this vestigial remnant of _juventus mundi_, this dismal anachronism, this veteran inharmony in the scheme of things, the dog, has abated no jot nor tittle of his unthinkable objectionableness since the morning stars sang together and he had sat up all night to deflate a lung at the performance. Possibly he may some time be improved otherwise than by effacement, but at present he is still in that early stage of reform that is not inconsistent with a mouthful of reformer. The dog is a detestable quadruped. He knows more ways to be unmentionable than can be named in seven languages. The word “dog” is a term of contempt the world over, as in the Scriptures. Poets have sung and prosaists have prosed of the virtues of individual dogs, but nobody has had the hardihood to eulogize the species. No man loves the Dog; one loves his own dog, and there stops; the force of perverted affection can no further go. He loves his own dog partly because that thrifty creature, ever cadging when not marauding, tickles his vanity by fawning upon him as the visible source of steaks and bones; and partly because the graceless beast insults everybody else, harming as many as he dares.