of ‘Sharps and Flats’ has been a little fox terrier given to the writer hereof by his friend, Mr. Will J. Davis.  We named our little companion Jessie, and our attachment to her was wholly reciprocated by Jessie herself, although (and we make this confession very shamefacedly) our enthusiasm for Jessie was by no means shared by the prudent housewife in charge of the writer’s domestic affairs.  Jessie contributed to and participated in our work in this wise:  She would sit and admiringly watch the writer at his work, wagging her abridged tail cordially whenever he bestowed a casual glance upon her, threatening violence to every intruder, warning her master of the approach of every garrulous visitor, and oftentimes, when she felt lonely, insisted on climbing up into her master’s lap and slumbering there while he wrote and wrote away.  We have tried our poems on Jessie, and she always liked them; leastwise she always wagged her tail approvingly and smiled her flatteries as only a very intelligent little dog can.  Some folk think that our poetry drove Jessie away from home, but we know better; Jessie herself would deny that malicious imputation were she here now and could she speak.

“To this little companion we became strongly, perhaps foolishly, attached.  She walked with us by day, hunting rats and playing famously every variety of intelligent antics.  Whither we went she went, and at night she shared our couch with us.  Though only nine months old Jessie stole into this life of ours so very far that years seemed hardly to compass the period and honesty of our friendship.

“Well, last Tuesday night Jessie disappeared—­vanished as mysteriously as if the earth had opened up and swallowed her.  She had been playing with a discreet dog friend in Fullerton Avenue, and that was the last seen of her!  Where can she have gone?  It is very lonesome without Jessie.  Moreover there are poems to be read for her approval before they can be printed; the great cause of literature waits upon Jessie.  She must be found and restored to her proper sphere.

“Jessie perhaps was not beautiful, yet she was fair to her master’s eyes.  She was white with yellow ears and a brownish blaze over her left eye and warty cheek.  She weighed perhaps twenty pounds (for Jessie never had dyspepsia), and one mark you surely could tell her by was the absence of a nail from her left forepaw, the honorable penalty of an encounter with an enraged setting hen in our barn last month.

“Jessie’s master is not rich, for the poetry that fox terriers approve is not remunerative; but that master has accumulated (by means of industrious application to his work and his friends) the sum of $20, which he will cheerfully pay to the man, woman, or child who will bring Jessie back again.  For he is a weak human creature, is Jessie’s master, in his loneliness, without his faithful, admiring little dumb friend.”

Two days later Field printed the following letter and his answer thereto, both written by the same hand in his column: