ODDITIES OF ANIMAL CHARACTER. 261 



ODDITIES OF ANIMAL CHAKACTER. 



MR. J. S. MILL, in his essay on " Liberty," long ago warned us 

 against the stupefying influence of custom upon human beings? 

 and held that we ought to encourage eccentricities in each other, and 

 to guard jealously the right to be eccentric, instead of insisting on 

 reducinof every one by the hard-and-fast Procrustean standard to a 

 single dead-level of mediocrity. But, whatever our sins may be in this 

 respect toward human beings, surely they are greater still toward the 

 domestic animals. We reduce our horses, so far as possible, to the 

 mechanical condition of locomotive-engines — indeed, eccentric horses 

 might involve very serious dangers to life and limb — our dogs to senti- 

 nels, which we drill to a social decorum as rigid as our own ; while 

 we regard the eccentricities of a cat with undisguised horror, as the 

 mere pi-elude to dangerous insanity. No one who watches can fail to 

 see how bigoted we are against anything like a "new departure" 

 among our poor relations. If a man begins to save against his old 

 age, we call it thrift, and praise him as a small capitalist who is giving 

 hostages to fortune ; but if a dog accumulates a store of bones or food, 

 we look upon him as indulging in dangerous caprices, which may end 

 in the necessity of putting a bullet through his head. There may be 

 exceptions here and there. Sometimes you will find an old lady who 

 will protect eccentricity in a parrot, a magpie, or a jackdaw, as a bird 

 that has a right to a certain freedom of movement in return for its 

 entertaining attempts at conversation. But, on the whole, there is no 

 sterner standard of conventionality than that which we enforce on our 

 domestic animals. Pet dogs become perfect bigots in favor of the 

 usual, and persecute any attempt to deviate from it on the part even 

 of a more powerful and less favored colleague, as the Inquisition perse- 

 cuted heresy, or as the court of Russia persecutes Nihilism. There is 

 nothing equal to the indignation of an in-doors dog at any invasion of 

 the privacy of the drawing-room by an out-doors dog, and nothing 

 more melancholy than the servile apologies which the big dog will 

 make to the little one, for even proposing to break through the animal 

 etiquette of the house. The horror of the queen's chamberlain, when 

 once an officer presented himself at the levee in the proper court suit 

 diversified by slippers, which he had forgotten to exchange for the 

 regulation boots, was not so great as the horror of the terrier and the 

 Pomeranian when a collie or a setter presents himself on the thresh- 

 old of their mistress's sitting-room. We smother the genius of our 

 dogs with our conventionalisms, and stifle the originality of our cats 

 with luxurious bribes. We did, indeed, meet the other day, within 

 the precincts of a great cathedral, with a young cat who was spoken 

 of as " epoch-making " — as likely even to originate a new hegira by the 



