V.THE DOGS.
And during all that week I had pursued my usual monotonies, happy that they were such, tired to death of battles, and the bulletins of newspapers, which had added such a tangle of falsehood to the wickedness of slaughter; happy that I was where I could see the sun rise and go down without touching with his ray, so far as my rustic horizon was concerned, a soldier’s tent or a soldier’s grave; moping, in the very licentiousness of laziness, with my seraphic pipe between my teeth, over a thousand trifles, such as ingoing and outcoming of shadows on the leaf-domes of the woods; enjoying the soothing spasm with dinner of green peas, fresh pulled from vines that in my airy fancy called back old travels through the low shrubbery of the French vineyards; having now and then a townsman’s visit to cheer me back, if cheerful it be, to a consciousness of taxes and municipal street-sweepings, of city lamps lit up as regularly as the night came down,—a visit that in its way was as pleasant to me as the old trees or the gray rocks crowding around their base; a friend to sit with me in the old back porch and look at the grand wooding ofthat desecrated hill, to sip with me the test of hospitality, and smoke the pipe of peace in the peaceful air that takes no offence at the indulgence of any method by which honest men earn the recompense of honest living; avoiding all topics of scandal, blessed in that rural asylum in the absence of all objects of scandal; going into the woods now and then and often, out of which, like Peter the Czar, I had built my city and peopled it with my own people; and all the time so ignorant of the two dead children who lay within easy range of my vision. There they lay all that festering week, and here was I so near to them, following out the idle purpose of a perhaps useless life,—they perhaps of no greater use to all the world in their dead slumbering than I in my grand philosophy of lethargy.
My host was blessed with two dogs, and, very oddly, they bore the same name, Jack. One was a bull-dog, but, strange to say for his breed, of a sweet and even, more than common, Christian disposition, inasmuch as I never knew him to turn from the person he had once elevated to his friendship. In his firm, calm old face, there was nothing of deceit. Making his protestations of love to you in his own way of muscular revelation, you might be sure of his proffer, and that he never would trick you out of your confidence. I have known bipedical bull-dogs do otherwise; and they turned out afterwards to be such arrant cowards that even mysolemn Jack, could he but have become acquainted with their behavior, would have swept them out of the sphere of respectable personalities by the vigor of his superhuman sincerity. The other dog was a fighting character, and as such I had not much sympathy with him,—war on a larger and more brutal scale had sufficed me,—and yet about him there was a geniality and honesty and pluck, that forced you, while you recognized his “belligerent rights,” to offer him your respect,—at least I did; and so there were times when he was allowed to accompany my placid Jack and myself in our woodway journeys. Friendly as they were with me, there was another whom they loved with the fervor of canine Abeilardism, and that person was their master, my host. I mention this fact now because it bears upon an incident of a very extraordinary nature, and which I will state in its proper place.
At present I have but to add a few words about these dogs. Though they bore the same name, they perfectly understood when they were separately called; that is, they comprehended their own individuality as we individualized them. I never knew them to make a mistake. Thus it was, Jack the gentle was never addressed, or had his name called, except in just such terms as we would use to a human being gifted with his rare qualities. Jack the fighter, hard-biter, great cat-worrier, knew when he was spoken to well enough; forthe manner of the family was such as they would use to a retired or active member of the prize ring, a tone half of uncertainty and the other half of admiration. They were, in fine, two distinct characters, bearing the same name; but our voices being adapted to their peculiar idiosyncrasies, they sensibly drew the line of distinction in sound, and understood us.
It would be worth any one’s while to get two such distinctly different dogs in character, and try the experiment of similar names. It might at least afford Mr. John Tyndall, LL.D., of England, some hints to his theory of sound.