1876.) 
We sometimes found 
Animal Humor. . 263 
taken off, and head and body laid on the floor. Jack had now 
had a tearing time. The mischief done seemed to be to his 
heart’s content, so he slunk back to the shelf in his cage, on 
which he sat, and looked: the very image of demure and passive 
harmlessness. We find here a humor of a grim and brutal sort, 
senseless and wanton, — as when the vicious boy who had badly 
burned a cat was asked his reason, and said, ‘ Oh, I don’t know. 
Only just for fun. I didn’t mean anything.” Human conduct 
abounds in this meaningless deviltry. Maybe this ogreish humor 
is a phase of that total depravity belonging alike to beasts and 
men, 
But for striking contrasts of fun and gravity, commend us to 
our young dog, Dick. On his mother’s side he came from a 
high-bred stirps ; of his father we know nothing. When Dick 
set about a frolic, all his powers were enlisted for the occa- 
sion. In the truest sense he gave his whole mind to it. At 
make-believe anger no canine actor could excel, and I have not 
witnessed his equal. I have seen him fly at his mistress, whom 
he loved with all the ardor of a devotee, as if the very furies 
impelled him. He would take her bare arm into his mouth and 
growl with the seeming ferocity of a Cerberus. Indeed, the sav- 
agery of that growl was one of the high colors in the picture. 
Had Dick been homo instead of canis, his histrionic rôle would 
Surely have been a buccaneer, bandit, or some such marauding 
man of blood. No stage-strutting hero could roll his gutturals 
more fearfully, A stranger entering during one of Dick’s tragedy 
fits would have thought his mistress a doomed woman. Make 
believe mad? 
Why, Dick would simulate “the very torrent, 
tempest, and whirlwind of passion,” 
simply a doggish joke, 
least mark 
| Some merry jets of doggish humor. When 
encouraged to do so, he would laugh, and so droll were these 
Canine cachinnations, that they would set the household in a 
roar. He would also stand up at the table, and, when told, 
“a make a feint at a baby cry for a morsel of meat, which 
an ig ludicrous. And, what was very strange, he could off- 
© wildest frolic with the staidest sedateness of conduct. 
© could turn on the instant from the comical to the grave. As 
» this very gravity was to us decidedly annoy- 
