We find them most expensive to keep up.
ON THE SPY-TRAIL.
Jimmy says his bloodhound is always very glad to get loose after being tied up all night, and it's because Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood. Jimmy says Faithful doesn't know he has got the circulation of the blood, but he always has a little run round when he gets free. It only takes him about five minutes to do his round, and an hour and a-half afterwards you would never believe he had been round at all, things are so quiet again.
Jimmy says the man next door told him he didn't mind so much about the circulation of the blood as the circulation of the bloodhound. Jimmy says it's because his chickens all begin shouting Hooray! as soon as Faithful starts, and they get up trees to watch him instead of being busy laying eggs at twopence each. Faithful doesn't want them to go up trees, Jimmy says, and tries to make them come down, but they won't—not on any account—and he has to leave them for other things that require his attention.
Jimmy says there's a charwoman in one of the houses on Faithful's beat, and sometimes you can hear her trying to char him, and then lots of things come out through the front door, with Faithful in the middle of them. Sometimes you don't know which is Faithful and which is a scrubbing-brush, and it's because of the revolution. Jimmy says if Faithful notices that anything wants doing on his way round he always tries to do it, even though nobody knew that it wanted doing. Faithful got a sparrow out of a greenhouse like that, Jimmy says. It was a cheeky sparrow and kept flying about at Faithful and hiding behind the pots on the stage. Jimmy says bloodhounds don't stand any nonsense of that sort, and the sparrow ought to have known it. But it kept looking round flower-pots at Faithful and chirruping at him sideways, and didn't realise that its life hung by a thread.
Jimmy says the best of well-trained bloodhounds is that they never get flurried; they go about their work systematically. The sparrow didn't seem to know that, Jimmy says, and when Faithful got on the stage and began clearing the decks for action it actually had the face to go and pick up a worm that came out of one of the pots that fell on the ground. Jimmy says whenever a pot rolled off the stage Faithful always looked over the edge to see if it had arrived safely. He is always careful like that.
Jimmy says the sparrow only escaped by the skin of its teeth, because just as Faithful had got everything out of the way and was going to set to work in earnest, the sparrow flew out and went and sat up in a tree chirruping like anything. Faithful was absolutely disgusted with it, Jimmy says.
Jimmy took his bloodhound out to the Hill Farm one morning. The farmer was very glad to see Faithful again, Jimmy says; he told Jimmy that they were going to cut corn and there would be a main of rabbits in them for sure. Jimmy says bloodhounds have to turn their hands to anything these days, even catching rabbits. Faithful didn't seem to mind, Jimmy says, but it seemed very curious to hear the deep baying of a bloodhound in a peaceful cornfield. Jimmy says it made the men stop work and look at each other, and the man who was driving the reaping-machine got down to see where it wanted oiling. You see he hadn't heard a bloodhound before.