158 HOW TO LIVE IN THE COUNTRY 



the mixtures of spaniels and bulldogs that gave my 

 boyhood many happy hours. With one of these I 

 used to skirt the hillsides and spend the whole day 

 in the blackberry glens. At lunch time he came for 

 his share of the cookies and drawing his lips care- 

 fully up, he would pick off and eat blackberries as 

 fast as I could with my fingers. 



Yet of all animals in America I think we are in- 

 excusably breeding more incurably worthless dogs 

 than of all other animals put together. If I were 

 going to the country to make a home for the first time, 

 I would surely have nothing of this sort about me. 

 Three-fourths of the whole canine stock should be 

 obliterated especially the town dogs that have no 

 reason for living except to eat the children's bread. 

 They constitute the waste material left by Nature 

 in her efforts to create something worth while. 

 When you get the mean all sifted out of animal 

 life and the true, pure, honest and brave all worked 

 in, you have a dog, and when you have all the good 

 worked out and all the contemptible ingrained, you 

 still have a dog. 



I am specially fond of good cats, and I have known 

 a few that were really honest and noble. One of 

 them roused a neighbor's family and saved them from 

 their burning house. White Face was my friend in 

 college days and he could almost talk in English 

 better at least than I could in Latin. He would 

 sometimes ask me if he might play with the chick- 

 ens, and when I gave permission, he would gently 



