THE BLACK-EYED PUPPY
I
I AM a little white, rough-haired dog, with a black spot around one eye, and black ears and tail.
I am about the size of a terrier or a spaniel, but I’m not really either. At one time I thought I might be a poodle, but then it turned out I wasn’t. I’m just not any special kind of dog. My mother wasn’t any special kind either. She was a smooth-haired white dog. Fan was the only one of us puppies that looked like mother.
There were five of us. There were Rover and Fanny, and Jack and Snip, and then me. My name was Smarty, but it isn’t now.
We belonged to a man named O’Grady. It was he who gave us our names, and he named me Smarty because I was so smart. He said I was the smartest puppy he had ever seen. I heard him telling someone that. He said, “Why, that pup can almost talk; I believe he understands every word I say.” Of course I didn’t, but that’s what he said. I did understand a good deal, though.
I was the only one of the puppies that he kept. He gave the others away to different people. He kept only mother and me. Mother was getting sort of old and cross. She used to growl when I tried to play with her.
Mr. O’Grady used to play with me in the evenings while he smoked his pipe. He called it playing, but it was rough sort of play. Sometimes he made me yelp. And he used to blow tobacco smoke in my face. I hated that. It made me feel sick.
He spent part of the time teaching me tricks. He taught me to sit up and beg, and to roll over and keep quiet when he said “dead dog,” and to hold something on my nose until he gave the word, and then to throw it up in the air and catch it.
He liked to make me show off before people when they came in in the evenings. They seemed to think I was very smart. I wonder what they would have thought later on when I belonged to Mr. Bonelli and was really a trick dog and acted on a stage, with crowds of people there to look on!