It used to be conventional and proper to bring up children in the belief that the great difference between humans and the so-called lower animals was that the humans had souls and that the other animals had not, but nowadays many parents do not seem to care to assume the responsibility for this distinction, and it is not because they believe we haven’t souls (what a convenient word it is!), but because they are inclined to suspect that the kindly beasts who love the children and are beloved by them, who enjoy such intimate companionship with them, have. However this may be, it certainly is a pleasanter, a more ennobling theory; one that tends to reduce human vanity, to extend sympathy, to increase the world’s happiness, and to promote a more specific and comprehensive interest in the mysterious and beautiful ways of God.
Most unintentionally I seem to have wandered from dogs and strayed into the domain of metaphysics—or do I mean theology? I don’t know anything about metaphysics or theology, but I know a great deal about dogs, and it was some dogs I had in mind when I sat down to write. Through a sad, autumn rain I have been staring out of my window into the garden where, side by side, some of them are buried; Friday, Thursday, Tatito, Spy, Rowdy, and—it is but a few lonely weeks that he has been there—Boozy. Mud, an Irish staghound, is at rest on a hillside in Dakota, and Jigger, whom I rarely see now, as he unfortunately for me does not belong to me, is fat, gray, capricious, but still alive, still adorable and adored. How they emerge and come back to me as I stand and look at the frost-bitten hollyhocks on the graves! What individuality each one had; how absolutely different they were; how inseparable they are from any retrospect of my youth—from, indeed, my whole life. With but few intermissions I cannot remember the time when some one of them did not play an intimate, an important, a memorable part in the little drama of my existence. Scarcely any phase of it fails to comprehend one of them. I feel myself thinking of them exactly as I think of the members of my family whom I have cared for, who did what it was intended that they should do and who then quietly left. To describe them, to dwell on their traits of character, their mannerisms, their little faults and eccentricities, the setness of their ways as they gradually grew older and then old, would seem to me to be an indelicacy if I did not realize that to most persons a dog is just a dog.
Jigger had, and still has, the most touching faith in the efficacy of prayer. When he needs or wants anything, he assumes the attitude and waits for results. If he is thirsty, one comes upon him appealing to a washstand or to a faucet in the bathroom; if he wants a certain kind of salted cracker he is found tired, but patient, believing, and erect on his hind legs in front of the cupboard in which he knows the crackers are kept. Once in the country he longed for a porcupine that seemed to him an altogether congenial sort of companion, and begged at the foot of a tree until the porcupine responded by coming down and shooting twenty-four quills into Jigger’s lovely little plush muzzle. It took about a quart of ether, a surgeon, and I forget how many dollars, to extract the quills. Jigger also keeps strange hours. Most dogs, I have found, adapt their hours to those of the persons they live with. They go to bed and arise when the family does, but Jigger, although a dachshund, is in some respects Chinese. Frequently at two or three in the morning it occurs to him that it would be agreeable to have some fun with a golf ball. The fun consists in somebody hiding the ball in a sufficiently discoverable locality and then letting Jigger find it. Perhaps I ought to be in an institution for the feeble-minded, but when Jigger, at 3 or 4 A.M., has deposited a moist golf ball on my neck and has then tugged at my sleeve until I woke up, I have always got out of bed, made a light, and, half dazed with sleep, gone through all the motions of his idea of a thoroughly good time. People who don’t like Jigger—and I have begun to suspect that they consist of the people whom Jigger cannot, for some reason, endure—say he is selfish. No doubt he is. Most of us are, only some of us have learned how to conceal the fact. Jigger never conceals anything except his golf ball. That, with the air of a conspiring sausage, he sneaks off with, hides from mortal view, and leaves hidden sometimes for a day or two at a time.
Friday and Thursday were part of my life so long ago that I find I can now speak of them with calmness. How shy and reticent and actually morbid Friday was! He had none of the enthusiasms, none of the ebullience, of other dogs. He lived with us, he knew he was one of us, he never temporarily left us for a day, as almost all dogs do from time to time. In his queer, rather uncomfortable way he worshiped us; I know he did because I know it, but he never actually made a demonstration of the fact as other dogs do. I can’t remember a single occasion on which he kissed my hand or asked to get into my lap or my bed. Even in his youth he was reserved and dignified and old. He had in life just one great pleasure, one dissipation, and that was to hear my father argue a case in court. He almost always went to the court room when my father had a case on hand, and many a judge has angrily ordered him to be removed; but no clerk or sheriff ever succeeded in removing him. Probably it has been forgotten, but at one time in the legal history of Minnesota there was no more prominent figure at the bar than a queer, shy, reticent, morbid but determined little yellow dog named Friday!
What a completely different personality was Spy-boy! An English greyhound with famous ancestors, he was physically a thing of perfect beauty—all fine, steel springs covered with pale brown velvet. When he stood between you and a bright light, the lower part of his stomach was translucent, and you could always see the throbbing of his heart. Although both by birth and by temperament an aristocrat, his breeding had not impaired his intellect. He literally had a fine mind. I think of him as a kind of canine Macaulay, except that he had about him a touch of mysticism; he heard sounds and smelt odors and saw things that no one else could. For hours at a time I have sat reading in the same room with him, an absolutely silent, scentless, uninhabited room as far as my primitive senses could discover, while he, poised on the delicate arch of his chest, with one front foot across the other (he always assumed that position in his moments of meditation), incessantly twitched his sensitive nostrils, moved his ears, and followed about the room, with his eyes, the invisible things he saw. I could see nothing except what I knew was there; he, however, could. Sometimes he would get up, slowly watch them until they disappeared, and then resume his position. One day, after he had sat this way for an hour or more, he arose, rested his head for a moment on my sister’s lap, and then fell dead.
How Rowdy admired him! Rowdy, too, was a greyhound, but poor, silly, stupid old Rowdy’s escutcheon was simply a grille of bars sinister. His humble, self-sacrificing attachment to Spy was as if he appreciated that Spy was the real thing, and that he was only a clumsy imitation. Spy was kind to him; at times it seemed to me that Rowdy’s society even mildly amused him, but his kindness was unmistakably that of royalty for some lowly and devoted dependent. Rowdy once chewed the front cover of the book that, in those days, I cared for more than any other: “Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative,” by Jane Porter. My youthful fury was extreme when I found the mutilated volume on the piazza, but even at that immature epoch my emotions were hopelessly mixed. I longed to whip Rowdy, because it seemed to me that my favorite book was ruined, but when he came up to me with every appearance of having forgotten the incident, I could only pat his head, as usual. His vandalism brought tears to my eyes, and, after twenty-three years, when I now and then look at the chewed, blue cover of “Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative,” and examine the little tooth marks, tears still sometimes come, but they aren’t the same kind.
And now they are all asleep under the frost-bitten hollyhocks, which I have turned to look at more than once since I sat down to write. Boozy’s life, his dignified old age, and his death are, somehow, too recent to speak of. I should like to, but I can’t.