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 Agriculture 

 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- 



