All these little gentlemen are subtle casuists.  The duty to the female dog is plain; but where competing duties rise, down they will sit and study them out like Jesuit confessors.[19] I knew another little Skye, somewhat plain in manner and appearance, but a creature compact of amiability and solid wisdom.  His family going abroad for a winter, he was received for that period by an uncle in the same city.  The winter over, his own family home again, and his own house (of which he was very proud) reopened, he found himself in a dilemma between two conflicting duties of loyalty and gratitude.  His old friends were not to be neglected, but it seemed hardly decent to desert the new.  This was how he solved the problem.  Every morning, as soon as the door was opened, off posted Coolin to his uncle’s, visited the children in the nursery, saluted the whole family, and was back at home in time for breakfast and his bit of fish.  Nor was this done without a sacrifice on his part, sharply felt; for he had to forego the particular honour and jewel of his day—­his morning’s walk with my father.  And perhaps, from this cause, he gradually wearied of and relaxed the practice, and at length returned entirely to his ancient habits.  But the same decision served him in another and more distressing case of divided duty, which happened not long after.  He was not at all a kitchen dog, but the cook had nursed him with unusual kindness during the distemper; and though he did not adore her as he adored my father—­although (born snob) he was critically conscious of her position as “only a servant”—­he still cherished for her a special gratitude.  Well, the cook left, and retired some streets away to lodgings of her own; and there was Coolin in precisely the same situation with any young gentleman who has had the inestimable benefit of a faithful nurse.  The canine conscience did not solve the problem with a pound of tea at Christmas.  No longer content to pay a flying visit, it was the whole forenoon that he dedicated to his solitary friend.  And so, day by day, he continued to comfort her solitude until (for some reason which I could never understand and cannot approve) he was kept locked up to break him of the graceful habit.  Here, it is not the similarity, it is the difference, that is worthy of remark; the clearly marked degrees of gratitude and the proportional duration of his visits.  Anything further removed from instinct it were hard to fancy; and one is even stirred to a certain impatience with a character so destitute of spontaneity, so passionless in justice, and so priggishly obedient to the voice of reason.

There are not many dogs like this good Coolin. and not many people.  But the type is one well marked, both in the human and the canine family.  Gallantry was not his aim, but a solid and somewhat oppressive respectability.  He was a sworn foe to the unusual and the conspicuous, a praiser of the golden mean, a kind of city uncle modified by Cheeryble.[20] And as he was precise and conscientious in all the steps of his own blameless course, he looked for the same precision and an even greater gravity in the bearing of his deity, my father.  It was no sinecure to be Coolin’s idol; he was exacting like a rigid parent; and at every sign of levity in the man whom he respected, he announced loudly the death of virtue and the proximate fall of the pillars of the earth.