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After this the bulldog blinked, and the shepherd dog exhibited his scorn with a gesture so impolite that it was a definite breach of etiquette. The crowd, however, applauded and went home, for the dog show was over.
The baby basset hound was far away from all this turmoil. Unconscious as yet that his coat is more sleek and warm than that of ordinary basset hounds, not knowing that his dark eyes have in them a more perfect lustre or that his bandy legs have a more effective warping, he slept in the early evening, dreaming, doubtless, of rabbits in which a basset hound delights. For him, there will be a year more of fields and country kennels. Then he will go to his first show. It will surprise him.
It would be idle to suppose that the tiny fraction of the U. S. canine population which last week posed and strutted in Madison Square Garden was in any sense the most important. Other dogs did not pause last week, in the performance of their deeds and duties, to admire the antics of these prototypes. Instead, as if stimulated by such a public display of good breeding, they spent a week of exceptional and most engrossing activity. Aside from their regular business—that of burying bones, digging up bones, barking at automobiles, scaring children, sniffing at feet or tree trunks, running in circles, sitting on their hind legs, biting hobos, etc. etc., certain individual dogs performed astonishing and varied feats:
¶ In North Bergen, N. J., six dogs led by one "Wolfe," espied William Kendy, eight years old, with several companions. When one of these companions threw a stone toward them the dogs loped toward their assailants. The assailants ran away except for William Kendy who fell down. The six dogs quickly pounced upon him, bit him twenty bloody times; then, when policemen came in answer to his screech-ings, loped away.
¶ In Manhattan, Max, a police dog, watched his owner, one Gilbert Kirkwood, a plasterer, going to sleep with a cigaret in his mouth. When he saw that Gilbert Kirkwood's cigaret had dropped and ignited the bedclothes, Max dragged the burning bedclothes away from Gilbert Kirkwood and put them in the kitchen. Then he dragged Gilbert Kirkwood, overcome by smoke, off the bed and put him in the kitchen right next the bedclothes. After this, Max barked until a policeman came to revive Gilbert Kirkwood and to extinguish both his bedclothes and the conflagration caused by dragging these from room to room.
¶In Manhattan, Sarah Lutkin came home to the apartment where she lived with her husband and two terriers. When she knocked, no one answered, no small dog ran barking and sniffing to the threshold. When she forced an entrance, she found Aaron Lutkin dead, asphyxiated by the gas which he had purposely turned on. Beside him lay the terriers, Jennie and Pete, dead also.
¶ In Reno, Nev., eleven Chinamen were arrested in a raid on an opium den. A shepherd dog, owned by one of the Chinamen, followed his master to jail, spent the night pacing between his master's cell and the confiscated opium pipes in the chief of police's office.