The Judge, he had stopped looking fierce, and was looking solemn.  Something inside him seemed a troubling him awful.  The more he stares at us now, the more solemn he gets, and when he touches us he does it gentle, like he was patting us.  For a long time he kneels in the sawdust, looking at my father and at me, and no one around the ring says nothing to nobody.

Then the Judge takes a breath and touches me sudden.  “It’s his,” he says, but he lays his hand just as quick on my father.  “I’m sorry,” says he.

The gentleman holding my father cries: 

“Do you mean to tell me—­”

And the Judge, he answers, “I mean the other is the better dog.”  He takes my father’s head between his hands and looks down at him, most sorrowful.  “The King is dead,” says he, “long live the King.  Good-by, Regent,” he says.

The crowd around the railings clapped their hands, and some laughed scornful, and everyone talks fast, and I start for the gate so dizzy that I can’t see my way.  But my father pushes in front of me, walking very daintily, and smiling sleepy, same as he had just been waked, with his head high, and his eyes shut, looking at nobody.

So that is how I “came by my inheritance,” as Miss Dorothy calls it, and just for that, though I couldn’t feel where I was any different, the crowd follows me to my bench, and pats me, and coos at me, like I was a baby in a baby-carriage.  And the handlers have to hold ’em back so that the gentlemen from the papers can make pictures of me, and Nolan walks me up and down so proud, and the men shakes their heads and says, “He certainly is the true type, he is!” And the pretty ladies asks Miss Dorothy, who sits beside me letting me lick her gloves to show the crowd what friends we is, “Aren’t you afraid he’ll bite you?” and Jimmy Jocks calls to me, “Didn’t I tell you so!  I always knew you were one of us.  Blood will out, Kid, blood will out.  I saw your grandfather,” says he, “make his debut at the Crystal Palace.  But he was never the dog you are!”

After that, if I could have asked for it, there was nothing I couldn’t get.  You might have thought I was a snow-dog, and they was afeerd I’d melt.  If I wet my pats, Nolan gave me a hot bath and chained me to the stove; if I couldn’t eat my food, being stuffed full by the cook, for I am a house-dog now, and let in to lunch whether there is visitors or not, Nolan would run to bring the vet.  It was all tommy-rot, as Jimmy says, but meant most kind.  I couldn’t scratch myself comfortable, without Nolan giving me nasty drinks, and rubbing me outside till it burnt awful, and I wasn’t let to eat bones for fear of spoiling my “beautiful” mouth, what mother used to call my “punishing jaw,” and my food was cooked special on a gas-stove, and Miss Dorothy gives me an overcoat, cut very stylish like the champions’, to wear when we goes out carriage-driving.