Pep: The Story of a Brave Dog

“Pep sniffed at his master’s face eagerly.” Page 96
By CLARENCE HAWKES
ILLUSTRATED By WILLIAM VAN DRESSER
MILTON BRADLEY COMPANY SPRINGFIELD · MASSACHUSETTS
Copyright, 1922 By MILTON BRADLEY COMPANY Springfield, Massachusetts All Rights Reserved Bradley Quality Books Printed in United States of America
To Dog-Lovers, the whole world over, this book is fraternally dedicated

By Clarence Hawkes
IT is almost like a stern irony of fate, that man’s faithful, gentle friend, the dog, should have sprung from one of the most thoroughly hated and despised brutes in the animal kingdom, the wolf.
Yet this is a scientific fact. The wolf, with all his meanness and skulking cunning, is the progenitor of man’s friend, the dog.
They belong to the same family, their breeding habits are alike, and the wolf is as surely the father of the dog, as was brute man, the cave dweller, the ancestor of the highly civilized creature we now know.
In the case of the man it has taken untold ages to bring about the change, and so it has in the case of the dog. When in the dark ages the brute man crouched over his campfire, gazing fearfully into the darkness about him, encompassed by superstition and ignorance, the gray wolf hung upon the outskirts of his campfire.