there--Pan and the Theban nymphs. The music and the song of the London
street roamer is excessively harsh, crabbed, and tuneless. Almost as
provoking it is, in a quiet way, when three or four quite harmless people
meet under a bedroom window and converse in their usual tone of voice
about their private affairs.

These little gatherings sometimes seem as if they would never break up,
and though the persons in the piece mean no harm, they are nearly as
noxious to sleep as the loud musical water-side rough or public-house
loafer. Dogs, too, like men, seem to feel it incumbent on them to howl
more than usual in hot weather, and to bay the moon with particular
earnestness in July. No enemy of sleep is deadlier than a dear, good,
affectionate dog, whose owners next door have accidentally shut him out.
The whole night long he bewails his loneliness, in accents charged with
profound melancholy. The author of the "Amusement Philosophique" would
have us believe that animals can speak. Nothing makes more for his
opinion than the exquisite variety of lyrical howl in which a shut-out
dog expresses every phrase of blighted affection, incommunicable longing,
and supreme despair. Somehow he never, literally never, wakens his
owners. He only keeps all the other people in a four-mile radius wide
awake. Yet how few have the energy and public spirit to get up and go
for that dog with sticks, umbrellas, and pieces of road-metal! The most
enterprising do little more than shout at him out of the window, or take
long futile shots at him with bits of coal from the fireplace. When we
have a Municipal Government of London, then, perhaps, measures will be
taken with dogs, and justice will be meted out to the owners of fowls. At
present these fiends in human shape can keep their detestable pets, and
defy the menaces, as they have rejected the prayers, of their neighbours.
The amount of profanity, insanity, ill-health, and general misery which
one rooster can cause is far beyond calculation.