We resolved that the whole affair in which we had been engaged should remain forever buried in oblivion. But time and reflection have wrought a change with me, though I shall not presume to disturb the veil which covers my associates. I have come to consider the adventure quite too good to be lost, and the experiment in aerial navigation, which came so near proving successful, of too much importance to science to be suppressed. Hence, conquering my repugnance, I have decided, on my own responsibility, to give these interesting and valuable particulars to the world.
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DOG-TALK.
Exactly,—Dog-Talk. And I sit down to write some of it out, in the middle of this pleasant month of May, lest, peradventure, if I postpone my task for a few weeks longer, I may fall in with my memories some time in the raging days of the dog-star, when the overwhelming sense of dog, in which, for the true working out of these memories, I must first dip my mind, may debar me from enjoying to the fullest extent the bounteous tap of Croton water which tinkles with such rivulet chiming from the silver (German) faucet into the marble (wash-hand) basin with which one side of my apartment is adorned. Hydrophobia is one thing, and hydrophobiaephobia is another.
Although but the mid-time of May, as I have said, the thermometer is reported at something not far short of eighty degrees, and that in as much shade as can possibly be had in the street in which I write, which is a brick street of New York, with one catalpa-tree in it,—a poor, vegetable fakir, standing on his one leg at a distance of about three blocks from "our corner," and sprawling out all round with his shrivelled hands, as if to catch the passing robe of some rambling breath of fresh air. With a trustful hope that this statement may be accepted in extenuation of the inevitable platitudinism down the gently inclined plane of which I feel myself impelled to slide into my memories, I will endeavor to bring some of the latter to the surface.
I fancy it has been already remarked by writers,—though that will not prevent me from repeating it,—that, of all the four-footed friends of man, none, not even that corpulent chap, Elephant, has contributed more voluminously to the literature of anecdote than that first-rate fellow, Dog. Let me also take the liberty of recalling, in corroboration of others who have previously drawn attention to the same fact, that from the earliest ages we trace Dog as the companion, friend, and ally of him whom alone he condescends to acknowledge as master, to accept as tutor, and to sympathize with in the spirit of hostility to obnoxious things, and in attachment to the sports of the field. It can hardly be necessary for me to explain that I allude to Man.
Above all other created things, Man is the one that laughs,—a remark, so far the present writer is aware, entirely original, and vastly more indicative of genius than the best of the platitudes incidentally referred to above. Some of the lower animals weep. The deer, for instance, has been observed to shed tears in the extremity of terror, and the hard-pressed hare cries like an ill-regulated child; but not one of them indicates any emotion analogous to the laughter of Man, excepting Dog. True it is, that we hear of a "horse-laugh." There is a beast, too, called the "laughing hyena," and a dismal beast he is. Among the feathered tribes there flourishes an individual named the "laughing falcon." From inanimate creation the poet has evoked for us "Minni Haha," or the "laughing water"; and the expression, "it would make a cat laugh," is frequently made use of in reference to anything very ridiculous. But in every one of these cases of so-called laughing things, the sound only of the laughter is there,—the sentiment is wanting. Not so with Dog, who, when the spirit of fun moves him, smiles beamingly with his eyes, giggles manifestly with his chops, or laughs uproariously with his tail, according as the occasion demands.
Yet, with all his wonderful gifts of intellectual ability, we cannot concede to Dog the possession of the supereminent faculty called reason,—the faculty which, as an eminent writer—Tupper, I think—remarks, places Man immeasurably above all the other animals stationed so much lower down, and by virtue of which he is lord and master of them all, leading Behemoth over the land with a ring in his nose, and towing Leviathan across the waters with a harpoon in his ribs. Fine as the line may appear which separates instinct from the divine gift of reason, we must see that progress, an essential consequence of the latter, is denied to the former. It is quite possible that the dogs which accompanied the first mariner in the first argosy were educated to fetch and carry, or were even so far accomplished as to sit up and beg; and it is but little more their descendants can do at the present day. But what of Man, who weathered safely the storm of storms in that same Ark? Compare that venerated bark, as imagined by us from traditionary description, with the least eligible of the ferry-boats which scud across our crowded rivers, and we have answer enough for the present, so far as progress is concerned.
Well, if Dog has never invented so much even as a patent rat-trap,—a thing, you see, that might have saved him some labor,—if he persists in disregarding the majesty of Fashion, and continues to move about in society with the same kind of coat on his back as that worn by his first ancestor, hatless, disaffected of shoes, and totally obtuse to the amenity of an umbrella,—if, in fact, his only approach to humanity, as distinguished by apparel, is his occasional adoption of a collar precisely similar in general effect to those in which Fashion, empress of Broadway and of a great many other ways, condemns her wretched votaries to partial strangulation,—well, say I again, in spite of all this, Dog is prime company. Intimately associated as I have been from earliest boyhood with many excellent fellows of the family, from social communion with which I am at present debarred only by the direful necessity of dwelling in lodgings,—a necessity which, if distasteful to Man, to Dog, oh, how fatal!—bound, I may say, as I was for years, not by straps and chains only, but by ties of confident friendship also, to canine comrades possessing the purest elements of worth and humor, it is to me a task not altogether devoid of interest to fall back on such memories as may enable me to chronicle a few reminiscences of the nobilities and eccentricities of the race.
Before I discourse of individual dogs of the present century, however, with whom I have had the pleasure of being personally acquainted, let me reproduce the following short tale of a dog from an old French volume,—a tome fittingly adorned with ears of that noble animal innumerable.