“’Lawyer Orkins, you lost a dawg, ‘ave yer?’

“‘Yes,’ ses you, ‘I have,’ like a gennelman—­excuse my imitation, sir—­’ and I don’t keer a damn for the whelp!’ That’s wot you orter say.  ‘He’s only a bloomin’ mongrel.’”

“Very good; what am I to say next, Mr. Linton?”

“‘Don’t yer?’ says the tother feller; ’then what the h——­ are yer looken arter him for?’

“‘Well,’ you ses, Mr. Orkins, ’you can go to h——.  I don’t keer for the dawg; he ain’t my fancy.’”

“A proper place for the whole lot of you, Sam.”

“But, excuse me, Mr. Orkins, sir, that’s for future occasions.  This ‘ere present one, in orferin’ fourteen pun, you’ve let the cat out o’ the bag, and what I could ha’ done had you consulted me sooner I can’t do now; I could ha’ got him for a fi’-pun note at one time, but they’ve worked on your feelins, and, mark my words, they’ll want twenty pun as the price o’ that there dawg, as sure as my name’s Sam Linton.  That’s all I got to say, Mr. Orkins, and I thought I’d come and warn yer like a man—­he’s got into bad hands, that there dawg.”

“I am much obliged, Mr. Linton; you seem to be a straightforward-dealing man.”

“Well, sir, I tries to act upright and downstraight; and, as I ses, if a man only does that he ain’t got nothin’ to fear, ’as he, Muster Orkins?”

“When can I have him, Sam?”

“Well, sir, you can have him—­let me see—­Monday was a week, when you lost him; next Monday’ll be another week, when I found him; that’ll be a fortnit.  Suppose we ses next Tooesday week?”

“Suppose we say to-morrow.”

“Oh!” said Sam, “then I thinks you’ll be sucked in!  The chances are, Mr. Orkins, you won’t see him at all.  Why, sir, you don’t know how them chaps carries on their business.  Would you believe it, Mr. Orkins, a gennelman comes to me, and he ses, ‘Sam,’ he ses, ’I want to find a little pet dawg as belonged to a lidy’—­which was his wife, in course—­and he ses the lidy was nearly out of her mind.  ‘Well,’ I ses, ’sir, to be ’onest with you, don’t you mention that there fact to anybody but me’—­because when a lidy goes out of her mind over a lorst dawg up goes the price, and you can’t calculate bank-rate, as they ses.  The price’ll go up fablous, Mr. Orkins; there’s nothin’ rules the market like that there.  Well, at last I agrees to do my best for the gent, and he says, just as you might say, Mr. Orkins, just now, ’When can she have him?’ Well, I told him the time; but what a innercent question, Mr. Orkins!  ‘Why not before?’ says he, with a kind of a angry voice, like yours just now, sir.  ‘Why, sir,’ I ses, ’these people as finds dawgs ’ave their feelins as well as losers ’as theirs, and sometimes when they can’t find the owner, they sells the animal.’  Well, they sold this gennelman’s animal to a major, and the reason why he couldn’t be had for a little while was that the major, being fond on him, and ‘avin’ paid a good price for the dawg, it would ha’ been cruel if he did not let him have the pleasure of him like for a few days—­or a week.”