The dweller on the cushion purrs No less when Soo-Ti barks and stirs. She blinks and blinks and lets you share Her bowl of milk, her fav'rite chair. For you she hides her cruel claw And taps you with a velvet paw; And, mastered by your lordly air, For you is meek and debonair. Even should you growl her hair stays flat: Be sure she thinks you half a cat. But you're a Dog and know your job: Oft have I seen you hob-a-nob, And grandly gracious to unbend With a Great Dane, your humble friend. As on the lawn with him you roll, He makes your very being droll. Yet how you set to work to flout him, To tease and gnaw and dance about him! You risk the pressure of his paws, Plunge all you are within his jaws, And, swelling to a final rage, With pin-point teeth the fight engage, While he submits his silly size To every insult you devise. At last, withdrawing from the fuss, You come and tell your tale to us, Bearing aloft through every room Your high tail's undefeated plume, Till, fed with triumphs, you subside, And sleep and doff your native pride, Composing in a wicker fane Those limbs that terrify the Dane. So, Soo-Ti, I have tried to praise Yourself and all your winning ways, Content if I may guard and please My little dusky Pekinese. THE BATH Hang garlands on the bathroom door; Let all the passages be spruce; For, lo, the victim comes once more, And, ah, he struggles like the deuce! Bring soaps of many scented sorts; Let girls in pinafores attend, With John, their brother, in his shorts, To wash their dusky little friend. Their little friend, the dusky dog, Short-legged and very obstinate, Faced like a much-offended frog, And fighting hard against his fate. No Briton he! From palace-born Chinese patricians he descends; He keeps their high ancestral scorn; His spirit breaks, but never bends. Our water-ways he fain would'scape; He hates the customary bath That thins his tail and spoils his shape, And turns him to a fur-clad lath; And, seeing that the Pekinese Have lustrous eyes that bulge like buds, He fain would save such eyes as these, Their owner's pride, from British suds. Vain are his protests--in he goes. His young barbarians crowd around; They soap his paws, they soap his nose; They soap wherever fur is found. And soon, still laughing, they extract His limpness from the darkling tide; They make the towel's roughness act On back and head and dripping side. They shout and rub and rub and shout-- He deprecates their odious glee-- Until at last they turn him out, A damp gigantic bumble-bee. Released, he barks and rolls, and speeds From lawn to lawn, from path to path, And in one glorious minute needs More soapsuds and another bath. PETER, A PEKINESE PUPPY