LORENE—A STORY OF A DOG. 
By SAMUEL PARKER. 
’ The promise of a present, previously made 
me by a physician friend, had passed trom my 
recollection, until one April morning an un- 
kempt lad from the village put in an appearance 
in the yard, carrying on his arm a little basket, 
which, with a, broad grin illuminating his 
countenance, he deposited on the porch with 
the remark: 
“L’ve fetched ye thet pup ‘at Doc. said he 
was goin’ to give ye.” 
Cuddled snugly within the basket was a 
dainty creature about the size of a boxing 
glove, with chubby paws, white and soft as er- 
mine fur, and enveloped in a soft luxurious 
coat of glossy white and liver-colored curls. 
Two gold-amber eyes blinked sleepily between 
a pair of silky ears which seemed ridiculously 
large for so petite a body, and a short, clean- 
cut nose completed the fout ensemble of the 
shaggy bundle which thenceforth responded 
obediently to the name of Lorene. 
Lorene, was of the King Charles breed of 
water spaniels, and her aristocratic descent 
was conspicuous in her daily walk, and I might 
almost add conversation, for among her varied 
accomplishments that rational trait could well 
nigh have been included. Her amusive pranks 
threw children into raptures, but, with that in- 
tuitive perception peculiar to sensitive natures, 
Lorene was endowed with the rare faculty of 
tempering her deportment in strict conformity 
to existing environments, and in the society of 
her adult admirers her manners were becom- 
ingly sedate and deferential; she accepted 
their caresses with an air as demure and 
modest as a conventnun. The eager fondness 
for sylvan diversions which was developed at 
an early period in her career discovered a de- 
cided penchant for the romantic, for she had 
an Indian’s passion for the woods and she 
would disport herself in the water as graceful 
as a mermaid. 
Perhaps a mutual tinge of this same spirit ot 
romanticism was the medium which prompted 
Lorene and her master to those frequent and 
delightful peregrinations amid the charms of 
outdoor nature, and made them so familiar 
with the fern-bordered paths of shady woods 
vocal with the enchanting whistle of wild birds 
and the songful harmony of meandering 
waters. I remark that it was perhaps a mu- 
tual tinge of romanticism that prompted these 
gypsy excursions, since in this severely prosaic 
and practical age, when ‘‘ red-lined accounts are 
richer than the songs of Grecian years”; when 
beneath the austere and withering frown of sci- 
ence beauty stands abashed; when the win- 
some music of the bells of Fairyland is floating 
faintly like dream-remembered voices from ‘the 
realm of myths, an open confession to a predi- 
lection of sentiment might be regarded as an 
unpardonable weakness. 
Fortified, however, by the assumption that 
‘all good men love dogs,” I am led to chron- 
icle a few of the most salient features in the 
disposition of this devoted companion of my 
rambles, trusting, moreover, that every gentle 
reader may likewise be disposed to the belief 
that, in common with poetry, music and the 
ideal arts, the pure well-springs of Nature are 
the divine sources from whence the fleeting 
generations fashion their pictures of Heaven, 
and which inspire their home-wandering souls 
with that sweetly persuasive and ethereal spirit 
of adoration that forever tends to keep their 
faces upward. 
Pictures of natural beauty that would have 
delighted the artistic eye of a Claude Lorraine, 
and over which the genius of a Byron or Burns 
would have thrown an unfading glory, revert 
to memory’s eye in recalling the varied and 
congenial haunts wherein it was Lorene and 
her master’s chief delight to wander. Sweep- 
ing expanses of [ndian summer woods, haze- 
dimmed and vivid with the crimson tide from 
autumn’s broken heart; night-enshrouded 
fields, fragrant with the dewy odor of clover 
bloom and illuminated with the floating lamps 
of the fire-flies; winding grass-grown roads, 
hazel-fringed and blazing with the sumach’s 
fire, leading to marshy springs in pensive forest 
depths, where the shrill and piercing call of the 
