“Easy to see you don’t know New York,” said Dandy, with a laugh.  “Poor children don’t live with rich, old ladies.  Mrs. Tibbett hated children, anyway.  Then dogs like poodles would get lost in the mud, or killed in the crowd if they ran behind a carriage.  Only knowing dogs like me can make their way about.”  I rather doubted this speech; but I said nothing, and he went on, patronizingly:  “However, Joe, thou hast reason, as the French say.  Mrs. Judge Tibbett ‘didn’t’ give her dogs exercise enough.  Their claws were as long as Chinamen’s nails, and the hair grew over their pads, and they had red eyes and were always sick, and she had to dose them with medicine, and call them her poor, little, ‘weeny-teeny, sicky-wicky doggies.’  Bah!  I got disgusted with her.  When I left her, I ran away to her niece’s, Miss Ball’s.  She was a sensible young lady, and she used to scold her aunt for the way in which she brought up her dogs.  She was almost too sensible, for her pug and I were rubbed and scrubbed within an inch of our lives, and had to go for such long walks that I got thoroughly sick of them.  A woman, whom the servants called Trotsey, came every morning, and took the pug and me by our chains, and sometimes another dog or two, and took us for long tramps in quiet streets.  That was Trotsey’s business, to walk dogs, and Miss Ball got a great many fashionable young ladies who could not exercise their dogs, to let Trotsey have them, and they said that it made a great difference in the health and appearance of their pets.  Trotsey got fifteen cents an hour for a dog.  Goodness, what appetites those walks gave us, and didn’t we make the dog biscuits disappear?  But it was a slow life at Miss Ball’s.  We only saw her for a little while every day.  She slept till noon.  After lunch she played with us for a little while in the greenhouse, then she was off driving or visiting, and in the evening she always had company, or went to a dance, or to the theatre.  I soon made up my mind that I’d run away.  I jumped out of a window one fine morning, and ran home.  I stayed there for a long time.  My mother had been run over by a cart and killed, and I wasn’t sorry.  My master never bothered his head about me, and I could do as I liked.  One day when I was having a walk, and meeting a lot of dogs that I knew, a little boy came behind me, and before I could tell what he was doing, he had snatched me up, and was running off with me.  I couldn’t bite him, for he had stuffed some of his rags in my mouth.  He took me to a tenement house, in a part of the city that I had never been in before.  He belonged to a very poor family.  My faith, weren’t they badly off—­six children, and a mother and father, all living in two tiny rooms.  Scarcely a bit of meat did I smell while I was there.  I hated their bread and molasses, and the place smelled so badly that I thought I should choke.