and after we had met I am glad to think he liked me still.  He used to point out to me with great earnestness, and even with some severity, that “a boy ought to have a dog.”  I suspect that he was shocked at my neglect of parental duties.  Ultimately it was he who provided the dog.  Shortly afterwards, one day, after playing with the child on the rug for an hour or so with the most intense absorption, he raised his head and declared firmly:  “I shall teach your boy to ride.”  That was not to be.  He was not given the time.

But here is the dog—­an old dog now.  Broad and low on his bandy paws, with a black head on a white body and a ridiculous black spot at the other end of him, he provokes, when he walks abroad, smiles not altogether unkind.  Grotesque and engaging in the whole of his appearance, his usual attitudes are meek, but his temperament discloses itself unexpectedly pugnacious in the presence of his kind.  As he lies in the firelight, his head well up, and a fixed, far-away gaze directed at the shadows of the room, he achieves a striking nobility of pose in the calm consciousness of an unstained life.  He has brought up one baby, and now, after seeing his first charge off to school, he is bringing up another with the same conscientious devotion, but with a more deliberate gravity of manner, the sign of greater wisdom and riper experience, but also of rheumatism, I fear.  From the morning bath to the evening ceremonies of the cot you attend, old friend, the little two-legged creature of your adoption, being yourself treated in the exercise of your duties with every possible regard, with infinite consideration, by every person in the house—­even as I myself am treated; only you deserve it more.  The general’s daughter would tell you that it must be “perfectly delightful.”

Aha! old dog.  She never heard you yelp with acute pain (it’s that poor left ear) the while, with incredible self-command, you preserve a rigid immobility for fear of overturning the little two-legged creature.  She has never seen your resigned smile when the little two-legged creature, interrogated sternly, “What are you doing to the good dog?” answers with a wide, innocent stare:  “Nothing.  Only loving him, mamma dear!”

The general’s daughter does not know the secret terms of self-imposed tasks, good dog, the pain that may lurk in the very rewards of rigid self-command.  But we have lived together many years.  We have grown older, too; and though our work is not quite done yet we may indulge now and then in a little introspection before the fire—­meditate on the art of bringing up babies and on the perfect delight of writing tales where so many lives come and go at the cost of one which slips imperceptibly away.

Chapter VI.