262 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
Golden Age was still on. I walked the streets and 
watched and waited; then, when nearly a week 
had elapsed, I witnessed a fine old-fashioned dog- 
fight, with two dogs in a tangle on the ground 
biting and tearing each other with incredible fury 
and with all the growls and shrieks and_ other 
warlike noises appropriate to the occasion. From 
all parts around the “ wond’ring neighbours ran” 
to look on, even as in former times down to the 
blessed year 1897. 
“Just as I thought!” I exclaimed, and heartily 
wished that the President of the Board of Agricul- 
ture had made the muzzling order a perpetual one. 
Other days and weeks followed and I witnessed 
no serious quarrel, and later it was so rare to see 
a dog-fight in the streets and parks, fights which 
one used to witness every day, that I began to 
think the new pacific habit had got a tighter grip 
on the animal than I could have believed. It 
would, I thought, perhaps take them two or three 
months to outgrow it and go back to their true 
natures. 
I was wrong again: not months only but years 
have gone by—fourteen to fifteen years—and the 
beneficent change which had been wrought in those 
thirty months of restraint about which so great a 
pother was made at the time by dog-owners has 
continued to the present time. 
We may say that in more senses than one the 
dogs (and cats) of the London of to-day are not 
the same beings we were familiar with in the pre- 
