His eye and nose were impeccable in their sense of form; indeed, he was very English in that matter:  People must be just so; things smell properly; and affairs go on in the one right way.  He could tolerate neither creatures in ragged clothes, nor children on their hands and knees, nor postmen, because, with their bags, they swelled-up on one side, and carried lanterns on their stomachs.  He would never let the harmless creatures pass without religious barks.  Naturally a believer in authority and routine, and distrusting spiritual adventure, he yet had curious fads that seemed to have nested in him, quite outside of all principle.  He would, for instance, follow neither carriages nor horses, and if we tried to make him, at once left for home, where he would sit with nose raised to Heaven, emitting through it a most lugubrious, shrill noise.  Then again, one must not place a stick, a slipper, a glove, or anything with which he could play, upon one’s head—­since such an action reduced him at once to frenzy.  For so conservative a dog, his environment was sadly anarchistic.  He never complained in words of our shifting habits, but curled his head round over his left paw and pressed his chin very hard against the ground whenever he smelled packing.  What necessity, he seemed continually to be saying, what real necessity is there for change of any kind whatever?  Here we were all together, and one day was like another, so that I knew where I was—­and now you only know what will happen next; and I—­I can’t tell you whether I shall be with you when it happens!  What strange, grieving minutes a dog passes at such times in the underground of his subconsciousness, refusing realisation, yet all the time only too well divining.  Some careless word, some unmuted compassion in voice, the stealthy wrapping of a pair of boots, the unaccustomed shutting of a door that ought to be open, the removal from a down-stair room of an object always there—­one tiny thing, and he knows for certain that he is not going too.  He fights against the knowledge just as we do against what we cannot bear; he gives up hope, but not effort, protesting in the only way he knows of, and now and then heaving a great sigh.  Those sighs of a dog!  They go to the heart so much more deeply than the sighs of our own kind, because they are utterly unintended, regardless of effect, emerging from one who, heaving them, knows not that they have escaped him!

The words:  “Yes—­going too!” spoken in a certain tone, would call up in his eyes a still-questioning half-happiness, and from his tail a quiet flutter, but did not quite serve to put to rest either his doubt or his feeling that it was all unnecessary—­until the cab arrived.  Then he would pour himself out of door or window, and be found in the bottom of the vehicle, looking severely away from an admiring cabman.  Once settled on our feet he travelled with philosophy, but no digestion.

I think no dog was ever more indifferent to an outside world of human creatures; yet few dogs have made more conquests—­especially among strange women, through whom, however, he had a habit of looking—­very discouraging.  He had, natheless, one or two particular friends, such as him to whom this book is dedicated, and a few persons whom he knew he had seen before, but, broadly speaking, there were in his world of men, only his mistress, and—­the almighty.