gmded generosity of philanthropists, had provided a remedy 

 which (so far as the dogs were concerned) was a hundred times 

 more lamentable than the evil itself. Let the reader imagine 

 an edict being passed to-morrow, prohibiting the application of 

 manual labour to all the donkeys in London, and. he wiU. at 

 once get an idea of the result of the above Act in relation to 

 draught dogs. The interesting question probably never occurred 

 to the ingenious Mr. Hawes and his colleagues : — what is to 

 become of the animals thus precluded from earning their main- 

 tenance P An indulgent master here and there, perhaps, pen- 

 sioned his old canine servant, but what became of the majority 

 of the less fortunate ones ? A creditable authority says : — 

 " We saw, one morning, upwards of fifty of them being drowned 

 in the Surrey canal." Indeed, on the very next day that the 

 Act was passed, hundreds of these fine muscular animals, some 

 of them nearly as large as young donkeys, were hung, shot, 

 stoned, drowned, or otherwise put to death; and within a, 

 month, there was scarcely one of these useful dogs to be seen 

 in the streets of London. 



To return, however, to the dog-working question. It was 

 not only as a beast of draught that the animal was employed. 

 Before the invention of that usefnl roasting apparatus the 

 " smoke-jack," there was attached to all kitchens where much 

 meat was cooked a couple of long, low, bandy dogs, known as 

 " turn-spits." At one end of the meat-spit was fastened a long 

 wooden cylinder with bars on the inside to secure foothold. 

 Into this wheel one of the dogs was put, and there he trod with 

 a walking action, which spun the cylinders and consequently 

 the spit round. The two dogs worked in spells of say fifteen 

 minutes each, and sure as the clock, if the " relief " did not 

 make his appearance at the end of a quarter of an hour, his 

 mate would either stand still and refuse to go another round, or 

 else he would leap out and hunt for the skulker. Singularly 

 enough, and as though they were fit to turn a meat-spit and 

 for nothing else, since the invention of modern cooking appli- 

 ances the turnspit-dog has been gradually vanishing from 

 amongst us. As says the Rev. J. Gr. Wood : " Just as the 

 invention of the spinning-jemiy abolished the use of distaff and 

 wheel, which was formerly the occupation of every well-ordered 

 English cottage, so the invention of automaton roasting-jacks 

 has destroyed the occupation of the turnspit-dog, and by de- 

 grees has almost annihilated its very existence. Here and 

 there a solitary turnspit may be seen, just as a spinning-wheel 



