He made no objection to my entering, neither did he receive me with any show of welcome.  There was no bounding forward, no wagging of the tail, no aimless walking around for a moment, and settling down in another spot; nor was there any sudden growl or forbidding look in the eye.  None of these things occurred to him, for none of these things was part of his duty.  The landlord would do the welcoming, the blue-shirted porter take my knapsack and show me the way to the coffee-room.  His business was to sit still and guard that archway.  Paying guests, and those known to the family,—­yes!  But stray mountain goats, chickens, inquisitive, pushing peddlers, pigs, and wandering dogs,—­well, he would look out for these.

While the cutlets and coffee were being fried and boiled, I dragged a chair across the road and tilted it back out of the sun against the wall of a house.  I, too, commanded a view down past the blacksmith shop, where they were heating a huge iron tire to clap on the hind wheel of a diligence, and up the street as far as the little square where the women were still clattering about on the cobbles, their buckets on their shoulders.  This is how I happened to be watching the dog.

The more I looked at him, the more strongly did his personality impress me.  The exceeding gravity of his demeanor!  The dignified attitude!  The quiet, silent reserve!  The way he looked at you from under his eyebrows, not eagerly, nor furtively, but with a self-possessed, competent air, quite like a captain of a Cunarder scanning a horizon from the bridge, or a French gendarme, watching the shifting crowds from one of the little stone circles anchored out in the rush of the boulevards,—­a look of authority backed by a sense of unlimited power.  Then, too, there was such a dignified cut to his hairy chops as they drooped over his teeth beneath his black, stubby nose.  His ears rose and fell easily, without undue haste or excitement when the sound of horses’ hoofs put him on his guard, or a goat wandered too near.  Yet one could see that he was not a meddlesome dog, nor a snarler, no running out and giving tongue at each passing object, not that kind of a dog at all!  He was just a plain, substantial, well-mannered, dignified, self-respecting St. Bernard dog, who knew his place and kept it, who knew his duty and did it, and who would no more chase a cat than he would bite your legs in the dark.  Put a cap with a gold band on his head and he would really have made an ideal concierge.  Even without the band, he concentrated in his person all the superiority, the repose, and exasperating reticence of that necessary concomitant of Continental hotel life.

Suddenly I noticed a more eager expression on his face.  One ear was unfurled, like a flag, and almost run to the masthead; the head was turned quickly down the road.  A sound of wheels was heard below the shop.  His dogship straightened himself and stood on four legs, his tail wagging slowly.