This advice, I believe, proved of some service to the juvenile goat; and by the way, reader, perhaps it may be worth something to you.

XV.

ON BARKING DOGS.

It is an old saying—­and there is a good deal of truth in it—­that “barking dogs never bite.”  I say there is a good deal of truth in it.  It is not strictly true.  Scarcely any proverb will bear picking to pieces, and analyzing, as a botanist would pick to pieces and analyze a rose or a tulip.  Almost all dogs bark a little, now and then.  Still I believe those dogs bark the most that bite the least, and the dogs that make a practice of biting the hardest and the oftenest, make very little noise about it.

Have you never been passing by a house, and seen a little pocket edition of a cur run out of the front door yard, to meet you, with ever so much bravery and heroism, as if he intended to eat you at two or three mouthfuls?  What a barking he set up.  The meaning of his bow, wow, wow, every time he repeated the words, was, “I’ll bite you!  I’ll bite you!” But the very moment you turned round and faced him, he ran back into the yard, as if forty tigers were after him.  You see he was all bark, and no bite.

Well, it is about the same with men and women, and boys and girls, as it is with dogs.  Those who bark most bite least, the world over.

Show me a boy who talks about being as bold as a lion, and I will show you one with the heart of a young rabbit, just learning to eat cabbage.  I do dislike to see boys and girls boasting of what they can do.  It always gives me a low opinion of their merits.

There is Tom Thrasher.  You don’t know Tom, do you?  Well, he is one of your barking dogs.  He is all the time boasting of the great things he is able to do.  Nobody ever saw him do any such things.  Still he keeps on boasting, right in the midst of the young people who know him through and through, a great deal better than he knows himself.  It is strange that he should brag at that rate where everybody knows him.  But he has fallen into the habit of bragging, and I suppose he hardly thinks of the absurd and foolish language he is using.  According to his account of himself, he can run a mile in a minute, jump over a fence ten rails high, shoot an arrow from his bow twenty rods, and hit an apple at that distance half a dozen times running.

I must tell you a story about this Tom Thrasher.  Poor Tom! he got “come up with,” not long ago, by some fun-loving boys that lived in his neighborhood.  Tom had been boasting of his great feats in jumping.  He could jump higher than any boy on Blue Hill.  In fact, he had just jumped over the fence around Captain Corning’s goat pasture, which, as everybody knows, was eight rails high, and verily believed he could have cleared it just as easily, if it had been two rails higher.  That was the kind of language he used to this company of boys.  They did not believe a word he said.