I dont suppose it will knock any of you people off your perch to read a contribution from an animal. Mr. Kipling and a good many others have demonstrated the fact that animals can express themselves in remunerative English, and no magazine goes to press nowadays without an animal story in it, except the old-style monthlies that are still running pictures of Bryan and the Mont Pilee horror. But you neednt look for any stuck-up literature in my piece, such as Bearoo, the bear, and Snakoo, the snake, and Tammanoo, the tiger, talk in the jungle books. A yellow dog thats spent most of his life in a cheap New York flat, sleeping in a corner on an old sateen underskirt (the one she spilled port wine on at the Lady Longshoremens banquet), mustnt be expected to perform any tricks with the art of speech. I was born a yellow pup; date, locality, pedigree and weight unknown. The first thing I can recollect, an old woman had me in a basket at Broadway and Twenty-third trying to sell me to a fat lady. Old Mother Hubbard was boosting me to beat the band as a genuine Pomeranian-Hambletonian-Red-Irish-Cochin-China-Stoke-Pogis fox terrier. The fat lady chased a V around among the samples of gros grain flannelette in her shopping bag till she cornered it, and gave up. From that moment I was a peta mammas own wootsey squidlums. Say, gentle reader, did you ever have a 200-pound woman breathing a flavour of Camembert cheese and Peau dEspagne pick you up and wallop her nose all over you, remarking all the time in an Emma Eames tone of voice: Oh, oos um oodlum, doodlum, woodlum, toodlum, bitsy-witsy skoodlums? From a pedigreed yellow pup I grew up to be an anonymous yellow cur looking like a cross between an Angora cat and a box of lemons. But my mistress never tumbled. She thought that the two primeval pups that Noah chased into the ark were but a collateral branch of my ancestors. It took two policemen to keep her from entering me at the Madison Square Garden for the Siberian bloodhound prize. Ill tell you about that flat. The house was the ordinary thing in New York, paved with Parian marble in the entrance hall and cobblestones above the first floor. Our fiat was threewell, not flightsclimbs up. My mistress rented it unfurnished, and put in the regular things1903 antique unholstered parlour set, oil chromo of geishas in a Harlem tea house, rubber plant and husband. By Sirius! there was a biped I felt sorry for. He was a little man with sandy hair and whiskers a good deal like mine. Henpecked?well, toucans and flamingoes and pelicans all had their bills in him. He wiped the dishes and listened to my mistress tell about the cheap, ragged things the lady with the squirrel-skin coat on the second floor hung out on her line to dry. And every evening while she was getting supper she made him take me out on the end of a string for a walk. If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone theyd never marry. Laura Lean Jibbey, peanut brittle, a little almond cream on the neck muscles, dishes unwashed, half an hours talk with the iceman, reading a package of old letters, a couple of pickles and two bottles of malt extract, one hour peeking through a hole in the window shade into the flat across the air-shaftthats about all there is to it. Twenty minutes before time for him to come home from work she straightens up the house, fixes her rat so it wont show, and gets out a lot of sewing for a ten-minute bluff. I led a dogs life in that flat. Most all day I lay there in my corner watching that fat woman kill time. I slept sometimes and had pipe dreams about being out chasing cats into basements and growling at old ladies with black mittens, as a dog was intended to do. Then she would pounce upon me with a lot of that drivelling poodle palaver and kiss me on the nosebut what could I do? A dog cant chew cloves. I began to feel sorry for Hubby, dog my cats if I didnt. We looked so much alike that people noticed it when we went out; so we shook the streets that Morgans cab drives down, and took to climbing the piles of last Decembers snow on the streets where cheap people live. One evening when we were thus promenading, and I was trying to look like a prize St. Bernard, and the old man was trying to look like he wouldnt have murdered the first organ-grinder he heard play Mendelssohns wedding-march, I looked up at him and said, in my way: What are you looking so sour about, you oakum trimmed lobster? She dont kiss you. You dont have to sit on her lap and listen to talk that would make the book of a musical comedy sound like the maxims of Epictetus. You ought to be thankful youre not a dog. Brace up, Benedick, and bid the blues begone. The matrimonial mishap looked down at me with almost canine intelligence in his face. Why, doggie, says he, good doggie. You almost look like you could speak. What is it, doggieCats? Cats! Could speak! But, of course, he couldnt understand. Humans were denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction. In the flat across the hall from us lived a lady with a black-and-tan terrier. Her husband strung it and took it out every evening, but he always came home cheerful and whistling. One day I touched noses with the black-and-tan in the hall, and I struck him for an elucidation. See, here, Wiggle-and-Skip, I says, you know that it aint the nature of a real man to play dry nurse to a dog in public. I never saw one leashed to a bow-wow yet that didnt look like hed like to lick every other man that looked at him. But your boss comes in every day as perky and set up as an amateur prestidigitator doing the egg trick. How does he do it? Dont tell me he likes it. Him? says the black-and-tan. Why, he uses Natures Own Remedy. He gets spifflicated. At first when we go out hes as shy as the man on the steamer who would rather play pedro when they make em all jackpots. By the time weve been in eight saloons he dont care whether the thing on the end of his line is a dog or a catfish. Ive lost two inches of my tail trying to sidestep those swinging doors. The pointer I got from that terriervaudeville please copyset me to thinking. One evening about 6 oclock my mistress ordered him to get busy and do the ozone act for Lovey. I have concealed it until now, but that is what she called me. The black-and-tan was called Tweetness. I consider that I have the bulge on him as far as you could chase a rabbit. Still Lovey is something of a nomenclatural tin can on the tail of ones self respect. At a quiet place on a safe street I tightened the line of my custodian in front of an attractive, refined saloon. I made a dead-ahead scramble for the doors, whining like a dog in the press despatches that lets the family know that little Alice is bogged while gathering lilies in the brook. Why, darn my eyes, says the old man, with a grin; darn my eyes if the saffron-coloured son of a seltzer lemonade aint asking me in to take a drink. Lemme seehow longs it been since I saved shoe leather by keeping one foot on the foot-rest? I believe Ill I knew I had him. Hot Scotches he took, sitting at a table. For an hour he kept the Campbells coming. I sat by his side rapping for the waiter with my tail, and eating free lunch such as mamma in her flat never equalled with her homemade truck bought at a delicatessen store eight minutes before papa comes home. When the products of Scotland were all exhausted except the rye bread the old man unwound me from the table leg and played me outside like a fisherman plays a salmon. Out there he took off my collar and threw it into the street. Poor doggie, says he; good doggie. She shant kiss you any more. S a darned shame. Good doggie, go away and get run over by a street car and be happy. I refused to leave. I leaped and frisked around the old mans legs happy as a pug on a rug. You old flea-headed woodchuck-chaser, I said to himyou moon-baying, rabbit-pointing, egg-stealing old beagle, cant you see that I dont want to leave you? Cant you see that were both Pups in the Wood and the missis is the cruel uncle after you with the dish towel and me with the flea liniment and a pink bow to tie on my tail. Why not cut that all out and be pards forever more? Maybe youll say he didnt understandmaybe he didnt. But he kind of got a grip on the Hot Scotches, and stood still for a minute, thinking. Doggie, says he, finally, we dont live more than a dozen lives on this earth, and very few of us live to be more than 300. If I ever see that flat any more Im a flat, and if you do youre flatter; and thats no flattery. Im offering 60 to 1 that Westward Ho wins out by the length of a dachshund. There was no string, but I frolicked along with my master to the Twenty-third street ferry. And the cats on the route saw reason to give thanks that prehensile claws had been given them. On the Jersey side my master said to a stranger who stood eating a currant bun: Me and my doggie, we are bound for the Rocky Mountains. But what pleased me most was when my old man pulled both of my ears until I howled, and said: You common, monkey-headed, rat-tailed, sulphur-coloured son of a door mat, do you know what Im going to call you? I thought of Lovey, and I whined dolefully. Im going to call you Pete, says my master; and if Id had five
tails I couldnt have done enough wagging to do justice to the
occasion.
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