my feelings, and was silently pitying the poor animals, when the proprietor of the miserable dog-flesh, stationing himself beside me, and placing his hands on his hips, sententiously observed,-- “Them critturs are the pride of the Isthmus. They’re a pair of the most elegant puppies in this State. Nary one of ’em would flunk out before any dog.” “They look very cowardly about the tail,” I remarked. “That’s the way of dogs’ tails on the Isthmus,” was his response. “Do you know what _Josh Billings_ says about dogs’ tails?” I frankly confessed that I did not; adding, that I was profoundly ignorant of _Josh Billings_, and pleasantly intimating that I supposed him to be one of the guards on the line. “I guess you haven’t read the papers lately,” continued my new acquaintance, as though pitying my ignorance. “_Josh Billings_ knows that there are some dogs’ tails which can’t be got to curl no ways, and some which will, and you can’t stop ’em. He says, that if you bathe a curly-tailed dog’s tail in oil and bind it in splints, you cannot get the crook out of it; and _Josh_, who says a sight of good things, says that a man’s way of thinking is the crook in the dog’s tail, and can’t be got out, and that every one should be allowed to wag his own peculiarity in peace.” That my Yankee acquaintance was partial to _Josh Billings_, and that anything which related to dogs was congenial with his tastes, I furthermore ascertained by noticing two scraps of paper posted on the rough wall of his cabin. I copied both. One was in prose and the other in rhyme. Here is the prose one:-- DOGS. “Dogs are not vagabones bi choise and luv tew belong tu sumbody. This fac endears them tew us, and i have alwas rated the dog az about the seventh cusin tew the human specious. Tha kant talk but tha can lik yure hand; this shows that their hearts iz in the plase where other folks’ tungs is.--JOSH BILLINGS.”