At the moment I was on the porch, waiting for my coffee, and my thought seemed to be shared by Jim, my bony young setter, who, being but a scant year old, had not yet forgotten the lesson of Greek art.  Over the grassy stretch before the porch he chased robins tirelessly, though with indifferent success.  His was a spirit truly Greek.  I knew it by reason of his inexhaustible enthusiasm for this present sport after a year’s proving that chased birds will rise strangely but expertly into air that no dog can climb by any device of whining, leaping, or straining.

Living on into the Renaissance, I saw that Jim would be taught the grievous thing called wisdom—­would learn his limitations and to form habits tamely contrary to his natural Greek likings.  Then would he honorably neglect rabbits and all fur, cease pointing droves of pigs, and quit the silly chase of robins.  Under check-cord and spike-collar he would become a fast and stylish dog, clean-cut in his bird work, perhaps a field-trial winner.  He would learn to take reproof amiably, to “heel” at a word, to respect the whistle at any distance, to be steady to shot and wing, to retrieve promptly from land or water, and never to bolt or range beyond control or be guilty of false pointing.

I knew that coercion, steadily and tactfully applied, would thus educate him, for was he not of champion ancestry, wearing his pedigree in his looks, with the narrow shoulders so desirable and so rarely found, with just the right number of hairs at the end of his tail, the forelegs properly feathered, the feet and ankles strong, the right amount of leather in his ear to the fraction of an inch,—­a dog, in short, of beauty, style, speed, nose, and brains?

But in this full moment of a glad morning I resolved that Jim should never know the Renaissance; he should never emerge from what Mrs. Potts had gracefully described as “the golden age of Pericles.”

To the end of his days he should be blithely, naively Greek; a dog of wretched field manners, pointing cattle and quail impartially, shamefully gun-shy, inconsequent, volatile, ignorant, forever paganly joyous without due cause.  For him I should do what no one had been able to do for me—­detain him in that “world of fine fabling” where everything is true that ought to be; where the earth is a running course, fascinating in its surprises of open road and tangled hedgerow; where mere indiscriminate smelling is keenest ecstasy; and where the fact that robins have eluded one’s fleetest rush to-day, by an amazing and unfair trick of levitation, is not the slightest promise that they can escape our interested mouthing on the morrow.

Doubtless he would be a remarkably foolish dog in his old age; but I, growing old beside him, would learn wisely foolish things from his excellent folly.  I knew we should both be happier for it; knew it was best for us both to prove that my thin white friend had been born chiefly to display the acute elegance of his bones and the beauty of hopeful effort.