She addressed him angrily, yet with a profound uneasiness.

“Dog!” she said.  “You ain’t feelin’ as skittish as whut you did, li’l while ago, is you?  My glory!  I dess would like to lay my han’ to you’ hide once, Mister!  I take an’ lam you this livin’ minute if I right sho’ you wouldn’t take an’ bite me.”

She jerked the leash vindictively, upon which the dog at once “sat up” on his haunches, put his forepaws together above his nose, in an attitude of prayer, and looked at her inscrutably from under the great bang of hair that fell like a black chrysanthemum over his forehead.  Beneath this woolly lambrequin his eyes were visible as two garnet sparks of which the coloured woman was only too nervously aware.  She gasped.

“Look-a-here, dog, who’s went an’ ast you to take an’ pray fer ’em?”

He remained motionless and devout.

“My goo’niss!” she said to him.  “If you goin’ keep on thisaway whut you is been, I’m goin’ to up an’ go way from here, ri’ now!” Then she said a remarkable thing.  “Listen here, Mister!  I ain’ never los’ no gran’ child, an’ I ain’ goin’ ‘dop’ no stranger fer one, neither!”

The explanation rests upon the looks and manners of him whom she addressed.  This dog was of a kind at the top of dog kingdoms.  His size was neither insignificant nor great; probably his weight would have been between a fourth and a third of a St. Bernard’s.  He had the finest head for adroit thinking that is known among dogs; and he had an athletic body, the forepart muffled and lost in a mass of corded black fleece, but the rest of him sharply clipped from the chest aft; and his trim, slim legs were clipped, though tufts were left at his ankles, and at the tip of his short tail, with two upon his hips, like fanciful buttons of an imaginary jacket; for thus have such dogs been clipped to a fashion proper and comfortable for them ever since (and no doubt long before) an Imperial Roman sculptor so chiselled one in bas-relief.  In brief, this dog, who caused Kitty Silver so much disquietude, as she sat upon the back steps at Mr. Atwater’s, belonged to that species of which no Frenchman ever sees a specimen without smiling and murmuring:  “Caniche!” He was that golden-hearted little clown of all the world, a French Poodle.

To arrive at what underlay Mrs. Silver’s declaration that she had never lost a grandchild and had no intention of adopting a stranger in the place of one, it should be first understood that in many respects she was a civilized person.  The quality of savagery, barbarism, or civilization in a tribe may be tested by the relations it characteristically maintains with domestic animals; and tribes that eat dogs are often inferior to those inclined to ceremonial cannibalism.  Likewise, the civilization, barbarism, or savagery of an individual may be estimated by the same test, which sometimes gives us evidence of sporadic reversions to mud.  Such reversions are the stomach priests:  whatever