For that matter, ancestors, contemporaries, descendants would have been a considerable incumbrance to him in his circumstances, which he will not hesitate to admit have been for the most part precarious, and in what has usually been his hand-to-mouth mode of picking up a living.
Not that he is a dog of no calling, or that he merely works on the job principle. You may notice that he has a collar round his neck, and is therefore of sufficient consequence to own a master. Indeed, he has nothing of the shirking, hang-dog air, alternating with the savage expression of the dog-tramp or pauper. His very heavy assurance and thorough mastery of the situation altogether contradict his belonging to that grade.
He may be low—one of the rudest and surliest of working dogs, but he is still a working dog, a trusty watch in the absence of his master from his place of work, a ratter of some renown. He is, to do him justice, removed from the deepest gulf into which dogs and men can sink.
But he is in error on that point of his relations without knowing it; for his truth and honesty, unless under overwhelming temptations, are among his best claims on our regard. Dog of the people as he is, he is not without distinguished kindred. We need not mention his unfortunate great-grand-uncle, who was the avenging shadow over the garret roofs of a certain ruffianly Bill Sykes, and who met the fate which is generally the portion of avenging shadows. He has other claims to a much more distant connection, certainly, but as they are to carry him into the upper regions of society, let them be counted. He has an ancestor in a dog named Trump, who was altogether in a superior position in life, and on his death received the honour of having a monument erected to his memory in the garden of the house at Chiswick which belonged to his attached master, the great painter. Our friend had also a canny Scotch cousin, who bore a part in a famous dialogue delivered in the district of Kyle, in the county of Ayr, and preserved and handed down to posterity.
It is time that we recorded our hero’s name, and began to give some particulars of his not uneventful plebeian history. I dare say my readers conjecture that his name was plebeian too, like all the rest about him—that it was “Jim,” or “Ned,” or “Crab,” or “Pickles,” or “Seize ’em,” or “Tear ’em.” Not at all. In spite of his democratic antecedents and proclivities, he had an aristocratic, nay, a royal designation. My own observation tends to prove that this inconsistent appellation was according to a law of human nature. In the various households belonging to the humblest ranks with which he had any acquaintance, there were to be found specimens of the finest, most sonorous titles in the English nomenclature. There was generally a Gussy or a Louie, and there were twice Fredericks and once a Marmaduke. The dog’s first master styled the waif, either in high-reaching ambition or in smouldering satire, “Prince;” and Prince, not President, he is likely to continue till the day of his death.
It is no reproach to Prince’s powers of memory—which, at the same time, were only remarkable in what were to him the parallel lines of meals and feuds—that they could not carry him back beyond that era in puppyhood when he was found, in one of the back slums of London, doing brave battle with a dog twice his size and age for a gnawed crust.
Unquestionably, Prince had not first seen the light in such a dainty kennel as might have impressed his juvenile imagination, and the loss of which would have made a crisis in his early history. The probability was that he was the puppy of some poor working dog, such as he himself became in after-life; and that the dog’s proprietor, after having tolerated him for a few weeks—during which he showed no signs of growing up of any particular value, and when no fellow-workman fancied the “pup”—had either separated him from his parent, and cast him adrift on the world, or had suffered him to be lost in the street, and thrown on the tender mercies of the police, as the easiest solution of the difficulty—happily less insurmountable than that of Ginx’s spare baby.
But the finder of Prince was not a policeman. He was a little boy named Jack, who was almost as audacious and reckless as the puppy, with the delight of a child in a young dog—especially in a young dog which is treasure-trove, and when there is the fraction of a chance he may be permitted to retain it for his own property. He decoyed Prince, still a nameless little cur, from the fray in which he was engaged, christened him Prince, with a splendid disregard of the proprieties, on the spot, and prepared to convey him home, tucked tightly within Jack’s ragged jacket.
Poor little Prince! pugilistic as he had already shown himself, and as he was doomed to prove throughout his career, he responded then, as he always did, in his gruff fashion, to the scant kindness which was shown him. He did not nestle to Jack’s heart or lick his dirty hand, for he was never a demonstrative dog, but he cocked the ears—short even then, before they had undergone the hideous process of cropping—looked up with his small beads of eyes in his captor’s face, as if acknowledging his master, and then gave one short, stiff wag of his stump of a tail, as if appending his signature—the signature of the puppy-father to the dog whose word was his bond—to the bargain.
That slightly ungracious, yet expressive wag of the tail did Jack’s business, and rendered him ten times more bent on retaining the puppy, in spite of sundry obstacles which he saw looming ahead of the connection, in the prejudices which might be entertained by his father and mother regarding their small means—of which Jack, boy as he was, did not fail to be aware—their limited house accommodation, and the number of his little brothers and sisters.