neighbourhood state you shall see them always
in the same hands, and always developing their
very best energies for the very worst company.
I have known a donkey— by sight; we were not
on speaking terms— who lived over on the
Surrey side of London-bridge, among the
fastnesses of Jacob's Island and Dockhead. It was
the habit of that animal, when his services were
not in immediate requisition, to go out alone,
idling. I have met him, a mile from his place of
residence, loitering about the streets; and the
expression of his countenance at such times was
most degraded. He was attached to the
establishment of an elderly lady who sold
periwinkles, and he used to stand on Saturday
nights with a cartful of those delicacies outside
a gin-shop, pricking up his ears when a
customer came to the cart, and too evidently
deriving satisfaction from the knowledge that they
got bad measure. His mistress was sometimes
overtaken by inebriety. The last time I ever
saw him (about five years ago) he was in
circumstances of difficulty, caused by this failing.
Having been left alone with the cart of
periwinkles, and forgotten, he went off idling. He
prowled among his usual low haunts for some
time, gratifying his depraved taste, until, not
taking the cart into his calculations, he
endeavoured to turn up a narrow alley, and became
greatly involved. He was taken into custody
by the police, and, the Green Yard of the
district being near at hand, was backed into that
place of durance. At that crisis, I encountered
him; the stubborn sense he evinced of
being—not to compromise the expression— a
blackguard, I never saw exceeded in the human
subject. A flaring candle in a paper shade,
stuck in among his periwinkles, showed him,
with his ragged harness broken and his cart
extensively shattered, twitching his mouth and
shaking his hanging head, a picture of disgrace
and obduracy. I have seen boys being taken to
station-houses, who were as like him as his own
brother.

The dogs of shy neighbourhoods, I observe to
avoid play, and to be conscious of poverty. They
avoid work too, if they can, of course; that
is in the nature of all animals. I have the pleasure
to know a dog in a back street in the
neighbourhood of Walworth, who has greatly
distinguished himself in the minor drama, and who
takes his portrait with him when he makes an
engagement, for the illustration of the play-bill.
His portrait (which is not at all like him) represents
him in the act of dragging to the earth a
recreant Indian, who is supposed to have
tomahawked, or essayed to tomahawk, a British officer.
The design is pure poetry, for there is no such
Indian in the piece, and no such incident.
He is a dog of the Newfoundland breed, for
whose honesty I would be bail to any amount;
but whose intellectual qualities in association
with dramatic fiction, I cannot rate high.
Indeed, he is too honest for the profession he has
entered. Being at a town in Yorkshire last
summer, and seeing him posted in the bill of
the night, I attended the performance. His
first scene was eminently successful; but, as it
occupied a second in its representation (and five
lines in the bill), it scarcely afforded ground for
a cool and deliberate judgment of his powers.
He had merely to bark, run on, and jump through
an inn window after a comic fugitive. The next
scene of importance to the fable was a little
marred in its interest by his over-anxiety: forasmuch
as while his master (a belated soldier in a
den of robbers on a tempestuous night) was
feelingly lamenting the absence of his faithful
dog, and laying great stress on the fact that he
was thirty leagues away, the faithful dog was
barking furiously in the prompter's box, and
clearly choking himself against his collar. But it
was in his greatest scene of all, that his honesty
got the better of him. He had to enter a dense
and trackless forest, on the trail of the murderer,
and there to fly at the murderer when he found
him resting at the foot of a tree, with his victim
bound ready for slaughter. It was a hot night,
and he came into the forest from an altogether
unexpected direction, in the sweetest temper, at
a very deliberate trot, not in the least excited;
trotted to the foot-lights with his tongue out; and
there sat down, panting, and amiably surveying
the audience, with his tail beating on the boards,
like a Dutch clock. Meanwhile the murderer,
impatient to receive his doom, was audibly calling
to him " CO-O-OME here!" while the victim,
struggling with his bonds, assailed him with the
most injurious expressions. It happened through
these means, that when he was in course of time
persuaded to trot up and rend the murderer limb
from limb, he made it (for dramatic purposes) a
little too obvious that he worked out that awful
retribution by licking butter off his blood-
stained hands.

In a shy street behind Long-acre, two honest
dogs live, who perform in Punch's shows. I may
venture to say that I am on terms of intimacy
with both, and that I never saw either guilty of
the falsehood of failing to look down at the man
inside the show, during the whole performance.
The difficulty other dogs have in satisfying their
minds about these dogs, appears to be never
overcome by time. The same dogs must encounter
them over and over again, as they trudge along in
their off-minutes behind the legs of the show and
beside the drum; but all dogs seem to suspect
their frills and jackets, and to sniff at them as if
they thought those articles of personal adornment,
an eruption a something in the nature
of mange, perhaps. From this Covent-garden
window of mine I noticed a country dog, only
the other day, who had come up to Covent-
garden Market under a cart, and had broken his
cord, an end of which he still trailed along with
him. He loitered about the corners of the four
streets commanded by my window; and bad
London dogs came up, and told him lies that
he didn't believe; and worse London dogs came
up, and made proposals to him to go and steal
in the market, which his principles rejected;
and the ways of the town confused him, and he
crept aside and lay down in a doorway. He
had scarcely got a wink of sleep, when up comes