“Good Lord! how will that help him? It reminds one of a story in the ‘Arabian Nights,’ where somebody with a crack-jaw name gives to somebody else—a porter, I think it was—a lump of lead, promising it will make his fortune. But he wisely declined to specify by what particular method the charm would work. I think the man weighted a fish-line with it, and caught a salmon with a diamond in its mouth. But you can hardly expect your scheme to work like that.”
“Wait and see, Ronald. I read in a German story book the other day how a dog had turned a man into an early riser (I shall give you one, Ronald), and made him charitable, and religious, and all the rest of it. Surely I can trust my dog to reclaim a man from one single failing.”
“I should like to see how he’s going to do it,” said Ronald incredulously. “The chances are your protégé will take his dog the first day to the nearest public-house. And, if he gets biscuits there, as a nice dog is sure to do, he’ll want no coaxing to take his master there every day. And the last state of that man will be worse than the first.”
“I am afraid there is no worse possible in this case. At any rate I have faith in my dog.”
The next day a ragged little hound, called “Judy,” was selected from the kennels at Thorpe Hill, and despatched to the protégé in question. Pure white she was, and so small, that, at a shift, you could hold her in the hollow of your hand. A veritable little mongrel, of course, if ever there was one. Indeed, nothing but a mongrel would have had the capacity for so delicate a mission. For, as we all know, it is to the mongrel that we look for intelligence and originality. The consciousness of inherited merit is fatal to intellectual progress in an animal of pedigree. Partiality—but only the most prejudiced—might have called Judy a rough Irish terrier. Only her ears didn’t lop, but were carried erect like a donkey’s, and her legs were too long, and her tail had an ugly “kinck” in it.
Having abused her sufficiently for her personal appearance, let me add that she had the sweetest and most winning of faces—chiefly composed of eyes, which were so large in comparison with the rest of her features that they seemed to swallow them up, giving to the face, as a whole, the thin, troubled look of premature age, which is so pathetic in any sick animal. But Judy was far from being delicate, and enjoyed to the full the zest and sparkle of life. With her head on one side, and her ears pricked up, and attention bestowed on the curl of her tail, a matter in which she was often negligent, she would have matched the best of them as a study of arrested life.
The two—the dog and the young reprobate she was expected to reform—took to each other with all their hearts, and soon became inseparable. But at first Ronald’s pessimistic prophecy seemed likely to be realised. True to his natural instinct, her master took Judy at once to the nearest public-house, and, as the biscuits due to an intelligent dog were always forthcoming, Judy fell in entirely with her master’s view as to the direction their daily walk should take. Ronald triumphed maliciously but prematurely. For Judy was to be recalled to her duty by a stern dispensation.
It happened one day, that, as she and her master were starting, a troop of bicyclists came scorching down the hill, and Judy, caught off her guard and losing her head, was run over, and taken up for dead. After long days of anxious nursing she was called slowly back to life, at least to a measure of life. But the little dog’s nerve was gone. From that day forward no persuasion could tempt her to follow her master along the public road. Warned by experience, she dreaded bicyclists at every turning. Just so far as the garden gate, and no further, she would follow him, and, with a thin little feeble whine, plead almost in words for a change of route. But the master’s heart was steeled. It was to be a conflict of will between them. And which was to conquer? the dog or the man? For days and weeks the result trembled in the scale. But the walk grew dreary apart from his companion, and, going and returning, he was haunted by the piteous whine. Then at last he succumbed. The day’s walk along the high road was exchanged for a run in the nearest field or common, and Judy’s heart rejoiced, and her spirit came again to her, and she became—almost, but never quite—her natural self again.
Thenceforth the sympathy between these two was complete. When Judy was ill again, almost to death, she was restful nowhere but in her master’s presence. When he left the room, her eyes would languidly follow him; when he came back, they kindled to life again, breathed into by a new spirit; and when he took her in his arms, all pain and disquiet ceased, and she lay neither shivering nor moaning—lost to all feeling but the satisfied assurance of his love.
“Well, Ronald, and how about my experiment?”