So I never goes out of the stables. All day I just lay in the sun on
the stone flags, licking my jaws, and watching the grooms wash down
the carriages, and the only care I had was to see they didn't get gay
and turn the hose on me. There wasn't even a single rat to plague me.
Such stables I never did see.

"Nolan," says the head-groom, "some day that dog of yours will give
you the slip. You can't keep a street-dog tied up all his life. It's
against his natur'." The head-groom is a nice old gentleman, but he
doesn't know everything. Just as though I'd been a street-dog because
I liked it. As if I'd rather poke for my vittles in ash-heaps than
have 'em handed me in a wash-basin, and would sooner bite and fight
than be polite and sociable. If I'd had mother there I couldn't have
asked for nothing more. But I'd think of her snooping in the gutters,
or freezing of nights under the bridges, or, what's worse of all,
running through the hot streets with her tongue down, so wild and
crazy for a drink, that the people would shout "mad dog" at her, and
stone her. Water's so good, that I don't blame the men-folks for
locking it up inside their houses, but when the hot days come, I
think they might remember that those are the dog-days and leave a
little water outside in a trough, like they do for the horses. Then
we wouldn't go mad, and the policemen wouldn't shoot us. I had so
much of everything I wanted that it made me think a lot of the days
when I hadn't nothing, and if I could have given what I had to
mother, as she used to share with me, I'd have been the happiest dog
in the land. Not that I wasn't happy then, and most grateful to the
Master, too, and if I'd only minded him, the trouble wouldn't have
come again.