I am not altogether sure whether I like the Dog or merely tolerate him. It puzzles me to say just what I do, in a manner, like about my house-companion. For a certainty, his manners are very distressing, and they evoke my most hearty disapproval. I cannot abide those rude volcanic barking fits of his. Often, when lying snugly tail-enfolded by the gently warming kitchen stove, lost in a comfortable dreamless doze--how delicious this semi-Nirvana of the senses!--I would suddenly be startled into undesired wakefulness by my friend's frenzied howls. You'd think he had wanted to call my attention to a mouse recently entrapped or, at least, to the arrival of the butcher with a fat quarter of lamb wherefrom one might expect the carving of good cheer for him and me. But no! nine times out of ten it would but be some uninteresting urchin whom he had caught sight of through the window, and who was sauntering a block away with an insolent swagger that could not but arouse my profound contempt. I sometimes find it far from easy to keep my temper in such circumstances and to refrain from wishing him and his urchin a watery grave the next time they betake themselves to the river for swimming and diving sports. Yet I must not judge him harshly. An unkind nature has granted him a most unmusical, a most nerve-shattering voice, incapable of the least culture. I take much exception also to the ungentle and ungraceful manner in which he swings his tail, or rather flips it back and forth and jerks it up and down, for one can hardly talk of swinging where no smooth delicately rounded curves are perceptible. How inferior, both by heredity and by training, is the Dog's handling of his tail to that of the Cat! How little he understands the art of curving and waving and uncurving the tail in the nicely nuanced rhythms and exquisitely designed patterns that are so familiar to ourselves! If the aerial artistry of the Cat's tail may be fitly compared to the beautifully rounded brushwork of our Chinese laundrymen when, as I have incidentally observed him more than once, he prepares his stock of wash tickets, the tail movements of the Dog remind me of nothing so much as the ugly zigzagging and unsymmetrical lines that my master's little boy produces, squeakingly, on his slate in his vain attempts to draw a locomotive (at least I gather, from various remarks that I have overheard, that this is what he has in mind). No, there is not the slightest reason to allow for an æsthetic strain in my friend's psychology. Frankly, I do not believe he knows the difference between an Impressionist masterpiece and a bill-board daub. Nothing, further, can be more absurd than the frequency with which the Dog's rapid and angular tail movements are executed. No sooner does the master, or his little boy, or the mistress, or even the garbage man appear, than this tail that I speak of is set furiously wagging and swishing, often at the cost of a cup or plate which may