23 o DOG STORIES 



WOW: A STORY OF A CAT'S PAW. 



[March 23, 1872.] 



I THINK you will be interested in the follow- 

 ing anecdote of a distinguished foreigner. 

 One of the happiest results of that abandon- 

 ment of their ancient exclusiveness which 

 has rendered us familiar with the Japanese, 

 has been the arrival on these shores of a 

 very pretty fluffy little dog, a born subject of 

 the Mikado, who hails or rather barks from 

 Nagasaki, and who is happily domiciled with 

 a friend of mine, of a sufficiently elevated 

 mind to esteem at its proper value the privi- 

 lege of being the master of a clever and 

 refined dog. The child of the sun and 

 the earthquake has been named Wow, an 

 ingenious combination of the familiar utter- 

 ance of his kind with the full-mouthed 

 terminals of the language of the merely 

 human inhabitants of his country. My own 

 impression is that Wow smacks rather of the 

 melodious monosyllabic tongue of the Flowery 

 Land than of that of the Dragon country ; 

 but this is a detail, and, as a young naval 



