incompletely equipped for the Hampstead ponds, with a pickle-jar and
wide-mouthed bottle, unless he is with them and barking tremendously.
There is a dog residing in the Borough of Southwark who keeps a blind
man. He may be seen most days, in Oxford Street, haling the blind man
away on expeditions wholly uncontemplated by, and unintelligible to, the
man; wholly of the dog's conception and execution. Contrariwise, when
the man has projects, the dog will sit down in a crowded thoroughfare
and meditate. I saw him yesterday, wearing the money-tray like an easy
collar, instead of offering it to the public, taking the man against his
will, on the invitation of a disreputable cur, apparently to visit a dog
at Harrow--he was so intent on that direction. The north wall of
Burlington House Gardens, between the Arcade and the Albany, offers a
shy spot for appointments among blind men at about two or three o'clock
in the afternoon. They sit (very uncomfortably) on a sloping stone
there, and compare notes. Their dogs may always be observed, at the same
time, openly disparaging the men they keep, to one another, and settling
where they shall respectively take their men when they begin to move
again. At a small butcher's in a shy neighbourhood (there is no reason
for suppressing the name; it is by Notting Hill, and gives upon the
district called the Potteries), I know a shaggy black-and-white dog who
keeps a drover. He is a dog of an easy disposition, and too frequently
allows this drover to get drunk. On these occasions it is the dog's
custom to sit outside the public-house, keeping his eye on a few sheep,
plainly casting up in his mind how many he began with when he left the
market, and at what places he has left the rest. I have seen him
perplexed by not being able to account to himself for certain particular
sheep. A light has gradually broken on him, he has remembered at what
butcher's he left them, and in a burst of grave satisfaction has caught
a fly off his nose, and shown himself much relieved. If I could at any
time have doubted the fact that it was he who kept the drover, and not