But so long as my nature is so disloyal to that great All-father, as to want a hat; thoughts will come into that superfluous, and therefore universally weak, part of the present human being, which goes into the chimney-pot—evolved, alas! as a penalty for that disloyalty. Oh, that Father Mollusk could only have foreseen a tithe of the woes, which the evolution of a head would entail upon his headstrong descendants! Unwise was he in his generation; and some Satan must already have been in posse, or why did Mother Mollusk—— But such questions are not Science; which allows no question of her bashful physiology.
Happier would have been my position now, if the survival of the fittest had omitted me, or at least had restored me to the patriarchal state of headless existence, at the bottom of the sea. All birds are now proved to have been evolved from lizards; which accounts for my complicity with the Saurian race, and their influence upon my destiny. And another piercing genius has certified us, that the canine race, being threatened with extinction, after milliards of years, by hydrophobia,[2] lay down, and eccn[=e]sted the protoplastic flea; who took to his labour of love, with congenital tripudiation, and rescued the author of his origin from impending annihilation thus.
Hydrophobia was the product of ennui, of lying chained up in the sun, and meditating too profoundly, as all dogs do. Thus, a dread of the depths of reflection was instituted in the mind of Towser, which developed, in the intellect of his descendants, into hydrophobia; and must have undone them to the ends of their tails, without the evolution of the genial flea. He, with an infusion of fresh blood, sprang forth, developed, his saltatory powers, by development of long legs—or vice versâ, for I am not sure which way that link goes,—and has ever since satisfied the exigency that developed him, by preserving every son of a dog thence generated, from the paraphrenitis of nothing to scratch.
"Acrior illum
Cura donat."
I thought of all this, (though without any room for the moral lesson it so well conveys) as I came upon old Grip, spread out largely in the sun, upon the pet flower-bed, upon the pet lawn, of that elegant Rus in urbe, as the house-agent called it—"Placid Bower." Grip had caught a lizard, which he did not care to eat, getting more in the trencher way, than he could away with, and finding his teeth more and more like a hay-rake, which has done its work upon a score of farms, by August. But it was against all the principles of his life, and the time-honoured policy of the nation he belonged to, to let go a hold he once had laid. And yet, as I could see by the twitching of his shoulder, and munch of his lip, he could scarcely tell how to defer the crisis, and climax, of a thoroughly exhaustive scratch. For no one durst wash him, except myself; and I had never been near him, for six hot weeks.
Poor old chap! It made all my low spirits go lower, to think that he could never more hear me, or see me, until I came as nigh him, as the length he once could jump. There was no need to chain him up any more, for fear of his flying at some visitor. He had lived in the world such a length of time now, that he cared not to strive any more against vice; unless it came meddling with his own dear belongings. All that old interest, of sticking up for honesty, he had long since resigned to his Oxford son, Grapple; whom he now approached with great consideration, through the loss of his teeth, and the stiffness of his loins. Grapple was bodily as good as Grip had been, in his fighting hey-day, neither was his pluck inferior; but the difference between them, in warmth of heart, and faith, and steadfast loyalty, was almost as great as that grown up, between our grandfathers and ourselves.
But I did not expect, well aware as I was of his staunch, and well-proven fidelity, such warmth, and I might say such wildness of welcome, as the ancient dog afforded me. When I called out "Grip," he pricked up his ears, as if he could never more believe them; and then he turned his poor eyes, spread with film; and looked at me, as if I were a memory. Beginning to get an idea of some bliss, he slowly arose, and shook himself; but still with his dull eyes set on me, and a tremulous inquiry of his worn-out tail.
"Grip," I said, "Grip, what an old stupe you are!" and the sudden joy made a young dog of him. With a mighty bark, such as he never expected to compass again, he leaped up at me, and put his great ossified paws on my breast, and offered me the delicate refreshment of his tongue. Then he capered about, and made such a proclamation, that the servants rushed out; and seeing me rushed back, to get things a little tidy, before they let me in.
I found that my mother was still from home, but expected to come back that night, and had written, to have the best bedroom prepared, for an invalid gentleman whom she would bring. This would, of course, be her brother William, of whom I had fully thought to hear as dead, and was greatly pleased to find it otherwise, having kind memories of him, and being uncommonly short of relatives.