So good-by to the collar of puppyhood, and let a real dog’s collar dangle about his neck. The step marked the change from dresses to trousers.
Not only bread and milk and other mushy non-stimulating stuff did he eat, but he ate, or tried to eat, everything else within his reach. Piece-meal, he ate most of the door-mat. He ate sticks of wood, both hard and soft, seemingly preferring a barrel-stave. He ate leaves, and stones, and lumps of dirt, and the heads off the double petunias and the geraniums. He ate a straw hat and a slipper. He attempted the broom and the clothes-line, the latter having upon it the week’s wash, thus adding to the completeness of the menu.
In his fondness for using his uneasy teeth, new and sharp, he would have eaten you, did you not repeatedly wrest your anatomy from his tireless jaws.
As it was, you bore over all your person, and particularly upon your hands and calves, the prints of his ravaging, omnivorous mouth.
Your mother patiently darned your torn clothing, and submitted to having her own imperiled and her ankles nipped; while your father time and again gathered the scattered fragments of his evening paper, and from a patchwork strove to decipher the day’s news.
And “Look at him, will you!” cried the hired girl, delighted, indicating him as he was industriously dragging her mop to cover.