"Halloa there! What are you boys doing?" A heavy policeman came grumbling along, without any sense of the situation; "if you don't move on, and take that beast of a dog further, I'll walk you pretty quick to the station." "331 V.," answered Jack, who inherited his mother's lofty style, "if you knew who we are, you'd employ your cheek to keep your tongue in, and save me the trouble of reporting you." The constable pretended not to hear him; but the whole of my volatile power was gone--so sensitive has it always been--and instead of going up to the sky, I was glad to sit down upon the broad back of the faithful dog. And now, I can assure you, and you will readily believe it, that having been plagued so long by boys, (and grown-up people, quite as troublesome, at times) concerning what had happened to me, at an early age, and being rebuked, and jeered, and scoffed at--sometimes for having this gift, and sometimes for not making more of it, and sometimes for setting up a false claim to it--young as I was, I had thought a good deal, and made up my mind, in fifty different ways, about it. But though my conclusions perpetually varied, there was one grain of wisdom to be found in all. It had pleased Heaven, to afflict me with an unusually light corporeal part, and then to relieve that affliction, in some measure, by the gift of a buoyant and complacent mind; so that I was able--unless a bad cold, or measles, or mumps, or chilblains stopped me--to be hopeful that all would turn out for the best, and to keep my nature boyish, throughout a boyhood of some perplexity. _Grip_, though faithful, and sage, as almost all the patriarchs put together, might still be considered a juvenile dog, by those who dwell chiefly on the right side of things. To say that his heart was still in the right place, would be little less than an insult to him, and to the great race of which he was one; but it is not so wholly a matter of course, that his mind was still ardent, and his spirit lofty. Very few "Scientists" of any candour could have looked at _Grip_, when prepared for battle (with his ears pricked up, and his neck on the rasp, and his tail set with stiffening bulges) without finding a nobler result of evolution, and a likelier survival, than their own. His thankful spirit had not yet exhausted the joys of freedom from the Railway box; and perhaps--though it is not for me to say it--the Happystowe air was more mercurial than that of our works, which confined his meditations too persistently to one theme--bone. But let that pass; it is quite impossible to explain everything that happens; all I know is that _Grip_ set off from the porch of the _Twentifold Arms Hotel_, with a flourish, and a scurry, and a gambol of delight. With a gentle breeze moving behind me, I started, to catch him and get the first sight of the sea; and then, down a steep path, we came round the corner of what must have been a live rock, and behold----