Landseer's Dogs and Their Stories

by Sarah Tytler

I believe Prince was nearly three years Mr. Jerry Noakes property without either dying or going mad; but then he was a dog of singular powers of endurance, as I have signified; besides, after the first few months of his joint experience of being a gaoler and gaoled, there were modifications introduced into the system which rendered it more bearable to him.

Mr. Jerry Noakes discovered that by the sheer force of habit, and of that defective imagination which prevents some men and dogs, though driven to extremity, from breaking out into independent enterprise, Prince, if let loose for a season, would return doggedly, of his own accord, to his durance on the expiry of a reasonable time. Therefore, when Mr. Jerry was himself on duty at the yard, he would free the dog, and send him out of the gates for a scamper, reflecting with a grin that he saved Prince’s feed that morning—since the dog was sure to nose out some booty in his outing—as well as preserved him in good health.

Even if Prince had, with keen canine sagacity and a yearning heart, sought out his former home, he would still have missed his old protector, for, in sinking lower and lower, the humble street where Jack and his family had dwelt in Prince’s day now knew them no more. The seniors and the younger children had gravitated without fail to the House; while Jack had become peripatetic in his vocation, and moved rapidly from one wretched lodging-house to another.

But, truth to tell, Prince did not attempt to make the discovery. He was too stupid, and too prostrated by slow starvation, to do more than prowl about the immediate neighbourhood of his yard, and stump—for Prince no more slank, not even when he was greatly in the wrong, than he stalked—back to his den when he was weary, or when some occult instinct told him that his leave was up.

Prince was not in some important respects the dog he looks in his picture when he was living with Mr. Jerry Noakes. He is a fairly well-fed dog, and in excellent condition, as we see him; but in those hard times he was reduced to skin and bone, his ribs could be counted, his mongrel disproportions were exposed in all their ugliness, and there was a wild look—that of a creature at bay, and which struck people as unsafe—about the dog.

Yet the lamentable change on the outer dog was not the worst result of Prince’s residence with Mr. Jerry Noakes; the inner dog was undergoing as sure a deterioration. Any good that had been in Prince was being stamped out of him. He was hardening back into the original savage wolf or jackal. His truth and honesty, which had been his best domestic qualities, were being corrupted and sapped to the foundation.

With Jack’s family Prince had been—well, free and easy in his practices; but the whole family had been free and easy in their ways, and anything like deliberate, premeditated larceny was unknown to the dog. There was all the difference that there is between manslaughter and murder in Prince’s helping himself occasionally when the opportunity came unexpectedly in his way, and when he knew that there was no great offence in the deed, and in his craftily planning and brazenly carrying out, in utter impenitence, the series of roll-liftings from the baskets on bakers’ counters, and trotter-snatchings from behind butchers’ doors, in spite of the butchers’ dogs, whose vigilance he managed to evade—by which Prince signalised his absences from the shed.

Mr. Jerry Noakes was right, that Prince needed no regular meal on the day of his temporary release. Indeed, if Mr. Jerry had known how liberally the dog fared on these occasions, the man might have sought covertly to share in the spoil, and might have been tempted, though he had no need, to run the risk of constituting Prince a professional thief and a permanent provider, in a dishonest manner, for the material wants of both.

But Prince’s diabolical cunning, that new and alarming feature in the dog’s character, was too much for his master. Prince took care to despatch every crumb and hair, and get rid of all traces of his unlawful proceedings, before he returned sullenly to his master.

It is all very well to laugh; but the dog, with all his craft, would have been caught red-handed some day and made a public example of, perishing miserably by a violent death, had not Mr. Jerry Noakes’ own death suddenly dissolved the connection between him and Prince. Mr. Jerry Noakes was removed at a moment’s notice from all his grubbing and grinding, and Prince, after narrowly escaping being forgotten and starved to death in the yard, fell into the hands of Mr. Miles Noakes, Mr. Jerry’s nephew and nearest surviving relation.